While Stormont Hid, The Community Stood

When the hit list went round, naming the homes of families in this city, nobody from Stormont came to stand outside those doors. I know, because I was there, and I’d have seen them. 

It was local people. Community people. The scary big bad “dissidents” who, according to the charlatans in Stormont, have nothing to offer and do nothing for their communities. We stood at the homes of residents on that list for hours, keeping them safe while putting our own safety on the line. Nobody paid us to do it. Nobody photographed us doing it. The families inside those houses know who was on their street that night, and that’s the only record that matters. We also spoke with the local businesses from different backgrounds and left our own phone numbers in the event of a racist attack. “Dissidents” raised £550 for a local man who was recorded being racially abused and those local “dissidents” sorted it out, enough said. 

Think about what the “dissident” Republicans standing on those streets did not have. No £67,000 salary a year. No fancy cars or Armani suits. No free meals in Stormont. No free charging for the cars. No Northern property portfolios extorting our own people. No mysterious charity pulling in £70,000 when it doesn’t even exist. The people who had all of those things, the people whose literal job description is to protect the residents of this city, were nowhere to be found.

I don’t see the politicians out cleaning racist graffiti off the walls either. They’re in hiding, sitting waiting on their head-honcho PR departments to put out a statement, and then they all share it with the comments turned off. A statement nobody asked for, defending a record nobody believes, posted from a safe distance by people who will never have to walk past the wall the graffiti was sprayed on.

I wasn’t at a press conference this week. I was at St James. I was in North Belfast. I didn’t see Sinn Féin there, or any other party, or any of these activists who live online. It was us, surrounded by twenty-odd of our own people in St James, trying to de-escalate, calm things down, pulling roadblocks off the road, stopping our youth from rising to the agitation of Crown forces. That’s what the work actually looks like. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t trend. It’s standing between angry teenagers and a riot squad that would love nothing better than a few more young lads in the system. It’s talking a crowd down when every instinct the state has spent years cultivating is telling them to go up.

And while we were doing that, the people who call us criminals and micro-groups and remnants were watching it on their phones from five-bedroom houses wrapped in safety and security.

As Brendan Hughes said: deeds, not words.

To be a dissident is to be a republican. That’s all the word has ever meant. The men and women who rose in 1916 were dissidents from the constitutional consensus of their day. Tone was a dissident. Connolly was a dissident. Every generation that refused to accept that the freedom of this country was a settled question was dissenting from somebody’s settlement. The word gets thrown at us as an insult by people whose entire political project is built on the graves of dissenters, and I wear it without a bother, because the alternative on offer is what we watched this week: elected leadership that evaporates the moment leadership is required.

To be a dissident is to be there. To actually be there for your people, not from the comfort of a fancy five-bedroom house wrapped in safety and security. It’s doing the dirty work that needs done. It’s being leaders when the elected leaders are nowhere to be seen. If you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Community self-reliance is how we deal with this. It’s how we should deal with everything. It’s how we did deal with everything, for thirty years, when the same state whose statements people are now waiting on was the thing kicking our doors in. Actually, they’re still kicking in the doors of Republicans. We deal with it by not relying on careerist politicians and landlords in green, men who spout the old message of republicanism while betraying it in its entirety. The community defended itself this week because the community has always defended itself. The infrastructure for it never went away. It got called a lot of names by a lot of well-paid people, but it never went away, and this week everybody got to see why it can’t be allowed to.

I’ve seen people talking about writing to Stormont and the parties to sort out this madness in the Six Counties. When will you ever learn? You still rely on the British Government and its administration here? The institution that built this sectarian statelet, that armed and indemnified the men who terrorised these streets for generations, that stops and searches our young people two thousand times a year for thirty arrests, is not going to be written into protecting you. It was designed to manage you. It is managing you right now, statement by statement, news cycle by news cycle, and it will still be managing you when the next hit list goes round.

The answer to Stormont is to smash Stormont. To end British rule in this country once and for all. Not because of an old song or an old grievance, but because everything this week demonstrated, the absent leaders, the empty statements, the communities left to defend themselves, flows from an institution that was never built to serve the people it sits above.

As Connolly understood, Ireland set apart from her people is nothing, and her people will never be free until they own Ireland entirely: her land, her labour, her wealth and her resources, held in common and worked for the good of all, not parcelled out to landlords and careerists.

That is the reconquest. That is the unfinished revolution.

And until it’s finished, you’ll find us where we were this week. On the street, at the doors, in the kitchen with the heat. Deeds, not words.