The Demise of the Old Guard

The Demise of the Old Guard

László Molnárfi

This is the natural order of things. New ideas arise, which are mocked and ignored, until they become commonplace. Carriers of fresh ideas, the new guard thus necessarily enters into struggle with the old guard, eventually replacing it, but not before a fierce clash of visions. On the Irish Left, it is precisely such a struggle which is unfolding between different sections of the movement, one which has become too noticeable to ignore. Yet, progress is not linear – it zig-zags, retreats and lurches forward once again – and some, unfortunately, become victims of their own prescience, an idea advanced too early, a vision put up for debate before the conditions of its victory have been brought forth by the tides of history.

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The owl of minerva spreads its wings only when the shades of night are gathering.

– G.W.F Hegel

It is thus with a sense of deep sadness that I read about Angela Nagle, a pioneer on the Irish Left, and her lonesome Cassandrian struggle against the tide of ossified party bureaucrats who refused change in order to safeguard their own positions. She suffered the price of being right too early. Nagle warned the Irish Left about what it was becoming, and for this, she was rewarded with exclusion from the movement, disappearing from public life after her cancellation near the end of the last decade. She was slandered by whatever “isms” and “ists” that could be conjured up in the mind of the pearl-clutching liberal and burned at the stake for her sins of trying to course-correct the Left towards normalcy. This ancient leftist history, however, has not gone unnoticed by the rising new guard of activists, who are engaging with her work in an effort to find an escape from a Left which is eating away at itself, and who are once again trying to dethrone an out-of-touch old guard. This time, our arguments too strong and our supporters too numerous, we will win.

Her case demonstrates the Irish Left’s inability to look outside its own bubble and realize its own deep unpopularity. The so-called revolutionary socialists today look no different than liberals, having been amalgamated through a process of elite capture. What was supposed to be a bulwark against neoliberal capitalism was in fact neatly integrated into it. Just as she predicted. Revolutionary socialists began to uncritically co-operate with liberal parties, NGOs and the mainstream media, and through this, have lost their identity. Their class character changed from representing the working-class to representing campuses. People Before Profit and the Socialist Party took the opportunity and pushed out homegrown Irish republican socialism. They replaced it with a politics which is foreign to the Irish people – the politics of woke. This was, however, not before a fight within these organisations themselves. An important one of these was criticism levelled by the Socialist Party’s parent organisation, that within the party, a “tendency has also developed of some leading Irish comrades seeing all struggles through the prism of the women’s movement”^[1]. Another was the Red Network’s factional struggle between 2020 and 2025 within People Before Profit, who correctly criticised the direction the party was taking, as “student moralism”^[2]. Too little, too late. With brilliant prescience, Nagle remarked in an unHerd article titled “Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave?” from January 2020 of the ultimate outcome of this process.

Having uncritically adopted the fashions of American academia, Ireland’s new young educated elite have started parroting the imported language of “white privilege” versus “people of colour”, and the dangers of nationalism versus the superior multinational capitalism-friendly values of openness.

[…]

It will now be a second but no less bitter irony that the native Irish working class will soon find themselves in the same position as the British have — despised as reactionary by our own elites and morally and economically blackmailed into accepting their more enlightened values.^[3]

Is this not what has taken place? This sort of politics rejects nationalism, republicanism and populism, everything that made the Irish Left what it was, and is instead a wilful retreat into the confines of liberalism, safe from the terrible possibility of victory. It is unable to capture the mood of the masses, those who have already come to conclusions far advanced than the meek utterances of the woke left. It is time that revolutionary socialists return to telling the truth despite unavoidable criticism, and take the side of the working class, just as they had for decades.

I leave this article with concrete suggestions as to what the Irish Left should laser-focus on in its messaging if it wishes to recapture the imagination of the people. The text here is exact. Wording is the most important in the production of propaganda. There is a reason why ‘sovereignty’ is picked over ‘neutrality’, why ‘puppet’ is picked over ‘influence’, why ‘Irish government’ is linked with ‘NGO sector and the liberal elite’, why “profiteering/racket” is picked over “profit”, “talking shop” picked over “inefficient”, “little Ireland” picked over “Ireland” and so on. These represent precise signifiers, evoking conceptual worlds in the collective unconscious, around which discontent can be organized. Importantly, there is no need to issue statements on every single issue. Build the friend-enemy distinction, that is to say, pick a few simple signifiers, channel discontent into them, repeat the narrative and let them branch out on their own. It should seem that the struggle is on for the soul of the Nation itself against a dangerous Other!

1. Ireland is not Sovereign: The Irish government, the NGO sector and the liberal elite are out of touch, dancing to the tune of Ursula von Der Leyen’s EU, orders trickling down from Brussels, as well as Washington and Westminster. They were the establishment who forced austerity on the Irish people. They seek to distract the people with ivory-tower academic NGO-driven virtue-signalling (e.g. “white privilege”), thus disregard the working class and in the process cede sovereignty to foreign powers. They openly threaten little Ireland with economic sanctions all for the benefit of Israel, who puppets Western governments. They seek to force hate speech legislation on the working class to restrict their freedom. The Irish people have no way of influencing politics; the Nation is not sovereign nor is it democratic.
2. Two Birds with One Stone: Empty homes should be requisitioned from vulture funds, and the IPAS system reformed. The elite profiteering from the IPAS racket are also those profiteering from vulture funds. Taxpayer money goes to a broken IPAS system which puts centers in already under-resourced areas. This is terrible for Irish people as well as for asylum seekers.
3. Down with Fake Democracy: Liberal democracy is in decay, a talking shop, when the time demands not talk, but action, and hence we should abolish it and return power to the people themselves through community assemblies into which all executive, judicial and legislative power is concentrated.

1. Kelly, F. (2019). Socialist Party documents illustrate criticism from international comrades. [online] The Irish Times. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/socialist-party-documents-illustrate-criticism-from-international-comrades-1.3815624 [Accessed 7 Jan. 2026]. ↑
2. MacRedmond, D. (2025). Socialist Red Network group quits People Before Profit over party’s ‘perfomative politics’. [online] TheJournal.ie. Available at: https://www.thejournal.ie/socialist-red-network-group-quits-people-before-profit-over-partys-perfomative-politics-6728569-Jun2025/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2026]. ↑
3. Nagle, A. (2020). Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave? [online] Unherd.com. Available at: https://unherd.com/2020/07/will-ireland-survive-the-woke-wave/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2026]. ↑