Why We Need to Finish Our Fight for Independence – No Shamrocks for Shysters protest 6th & 7th of March.
An analysis of our loss of sovereignty & dignity as well as a call to join the author at a protest against it.
April Maria Sheehan Corkery
We celebrate the men & women of 1916, the heroes of the War of Independence, & we remember the Civil War with solemn respect. We tell ourselves that their sacrifice gave us this Republic. But did it? We won the right to flag our own ships & stamp our own passports. We won political freedom. 75% of it anyway, more than a century after the so-called “War of independence” nearly ¼ of our land mass is still illegally occupied. But the economic war, the fight to control our own resources, to build an economy for the many rather than the few, to chart a moral course in the world, that war was lost completely on both sides of the border. It was abandoned in favour of civil war, & then gradually, piece by piece, ceded to foreign powers & market forces. This is aparant in our constant capitulation to both the US & EU, oftentimes also Britain, like a lost child trying to win the favour of 3 abusive parents in a dysfunctional dramatic love triangle. Now an adult, Ireland neglects its own children, its people, still trying to curry favour it will never gain unless something completely against its interests is needed from it. The only question the Irish government seems to ask is “Who’s (currently) our daddy?” Martin heading to the whitehouse to hand over a bowl of shamrocks to a fascistic alleged serial pedophile & rapist is just part & parcel of the humiliation rituals we willingly subject ourselves to because we currently have neither the spine nor the integrity to do what’s right & stand up for ourselves.
It’s worth noting that even the path that led here was chosen for us. In the 1950s Ireland applied for IMF development loans, the IMF having been founded in 1944, was giving out loans to developing countries & countries hit badly by WW2 to build their economies, we being a developing country at the time.
These loans came at a steep price. The price of these funds was our economic sovereignty, as protectionist economic policy was barred as a condition of the loan & we had to open our economy completely to FDI.
& to the people who screech about the importance of multinationals I say, screech a bit louder when you’re in the soup queue because one laid you off & the other evicted you. They might hear you in Delaware after US current foreign policy repatriates them or when others move to Malaysia who are one of the new global FDI stars. This situation was always coming & we should have invested what we could in ourselves while we had it. It’s drying up now, quietly, slowly. We already have an unofficial hiring freeze. Your only choice is do you meet the new reality grovelling on your knees alongside Fianna Fáil & Fine Gael for worse deals on worse terms or will you meet it standing with us trying to take back what was always ours?
Today, we are left with the shell of a Republic. True independence is the ability of a nation to determine its own destiny. It is the power to say that our gas belongs to our people, that our housing is for our citizens & residents, & that our foreign policy reflects our values, not the dictates of a unipolar Western bloc. To achieve this, we do not need to run to the East. We need to run towards ourselves. We need to finish our fight for independence.
The first battle is for our own land & resources. For decades, we have watched the wealth beneath our feet & the food from our soil & it’s true value to be stolen from us, with the explicit collusion of our own government. From the Corrib Gas project to the giveaway of our fishing rights, our housing & now Mercosur, CETA, far ranging mineral exploration deals some of whom are set to hollow out West Cork, & Acadian Seaplants. The latter having bought Arramara Teoranta back in 2014 one of the few indigenous industries serving Connemara & the Aran Islands up to then. Acadian sea plants are now wanting to essentially hoover the sea floor for seaweed along the west coast. Multinationals have always been given sweetheart deals that extract our resources & ship the profits overseas. The wealth of Ireland, the wind, the waves, the minerals, should be in a public trust, managed for the benefit of all citizens through a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Instead, we have accepted the role of an extraction colony for global capital for nothing more than a pat on the head & the role of laundromat via offices in Dublin for what’s extracted from elsewhere.
Similarly, our agricultural & agri foods sector, the very bedrock of our national identity, has been consolidated & controlled. It is, after all our only real indigenous industry besides tourism. The Irish family farm persists but they are all on their knees & only still there due to misguided hopes for a better year going on at least 2 generations now. The reality however, is domination by large meat processors & multinational agribusiness. Our farmers are squeezed by poorly thought out EU directives that oftentimes do more harm to environmental repair & intervention than good, as well as global market pressures. Forced into a model of cheap exports that destroys our environment & impoverishes our rural communities. Food sovereignty, the right to produce & consume healthy, sustainable food on our own terms, is a cornerstone of national independence.
Nowhere is this loss of sovereignty more visible than in our housing crisis. We have allowed housing, a fundamental human right, to be treated as a tradable asset. We opened our doors to vulture funds, many from the United States & the United Kingdom, which have been permitted to buy up entire portfolios of homes, inflating prices & extracting extortionate rents from our young people. We sold those for cents on the euro when the opportunity was there to convert them to social housing or to allow our people to buy & complete or fix them up if we put a scheme in place for that. Reclaiming our sovereignty means a massive public house-building programme. It means strong rent controls & the removal of housing from the casino of global finance. It means the outright banning of vulture funds, foreign investment in our housing sector, & of our land as well.
This leads us to the broader economy of dependency. We have hitched our star to the multinational corporation, particularly Big Tech & Big Pharma. We celebrate the jobs, but we ignore the trap. Our model of aggressive tax competition is a race to the bottom, & the profits generated here are funnelled abroad through complex transfer pricing arrangements. We have built a dual economy: a high-skilled, high-pay enclave for foreign nationals from white wealthy countries as well as a selection of the youth of our upper class & a struggling, underpaid indigenous sector for our own people & for the migrant workers that come to fill the gap left by our most bitter export, our own people, to build everywhere from Canada to Australia. True sovereignty means building a resilient, indigenous-owned industrial base that does not rely on the whims of a US Congressional tax committee.
The most disgusting affair I have seen in our treatment of our own people abroad in recent times has been the treatment by our government & in our media of the Irish in ICE detention. The main person the media have focused on, Seamus Culleton, has undergone nothing short of a character assasination. He has been held for 5 months in the most notorious ICE facility in spite of being married to a US Citizen, having no criminal record in the US, being in the process of obtaining a green card, & holding a valid work permit. The Irish media had to dig up drug charges from Ireland in 2009 rather than doing anything to help him, in order to turn public opinion here against the man rather than Trump. This ignores completely the fact that there are currently 6 Irish people rotting in ICE detention, not just Seamus Culleton. This is the extent of our cowardice & boot licking.
We have compounded this by selling off the family silver. The slow, quiet privatisation of our semi-state bodies has stripped us of strategic assets. We sold our stake in Aer Lingus. We watch as our energy & communications infrastructure falls under foreign control. We even allow the private sector to cannibalise our public services, as seen in the National Treatment Purchase Fund, which uses public money to subsidise private healthcare, entrenching a two-tier system. We don’t even print our own driving licences, or test our own vehicles. Thats all managed by multinationals on contracts, as is their compliance as the RSA isn’t even doing most audits on them, the AA is. A nation that does not own its own infrastructure, let alone enforce it’s own compliance, does not control its own destiny.
Our two-tier healthcare is a scandal born of this surrender. By mixing public funding with private, for-profit delivery, we have ensured that those with means can jump the queue, leaving a perpetually underfunded public system for the rest. The influence of private insurance & pharmaceutical lobbies over our Department of Health is a form of foreign interference in our most intimate affairs. Reclaiming our sovereignty requires a fully funded, universal single-tier health service, free at the point of use, a true National Health Service that answers only to the Irish people. It would also cost less. The British NHS pays almost half per person than what we pay out of the budget per person, they get it for free & things have gone so bad here even with all of this supposed “value & service” that these private operators were supposed to have brought us, that the HSE are paying the NHS for people from the republic to be treated in the north to take down the backlog.
This brings us to the corruption of our political life. We must speak plainly about the opaque role of corporate lobbying. The sheer weight of money from foreign tech & pharma giants gives them a veto over Irish policy. They are a shadow parliament, & they do not have our interests at heart. To finish the fight for independence, we must ban corporate donations, implement ironclad lobbying laws, & ensure our government answers only to its citizens.
On the international stage, our hypocrisy is laid bare. We cling to the rhetoric of military neutrality, yet we have hollowed it out through participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace & the EU’s PESCO. Through our allowance of the US military to use Shannon. A truly neutral state does not embed itself in the military infrastructure of a major power bloc. A truly sovereign Ireland would return to a policy of active, traditional neutrality.
To further this I would like to speak to the people of Shannon town directly. Many people from Shannon town, like to whinge & moan about people protesting the yanks in Shannon. I would like to remind ye, that before the yanks got the use of Shannon Airport it was thriving & growing. I know, at the time we lived 6 miles from Shannon Airport as the crow flies. Many of the planes used to use our hill as a landmark to come about for descent. What have ye now? Many days there are more flights coming in & out of Faranfore. To further that, Shannon had enormous potential to form an industrial corridor with Galway, Limerick & Cork. That was partially what Shannon Development was set up for. The Shannon Free Economic Zone was the first in the world, it inspired the Chinese free economic zones. Much as I disagree with neoliberalism, the Irish government cannot even do its own ideology right. It failed to form an indigenous manufacturing base surrounding the multinationals. It is still failing in that. We could have & should have invested some of Apples 13 billion in developing an indigenous tech sector with all the young freelancers we have floating around the periphery of the multinational tech sector. It is in your best interests more than any ones to get the US military out of Shannon & be part of a proper development of the mid west & west.
Nowhere is this moral failure more acute than on the question of Palestine. We are a people who know what it is to be colonised, to have our language suppressed, our land confiscated. Yet our government hides behind EU consensus & fears US displeasure, refusing to take a firm stand. Refusing to pass the occupied territories bill on the foot of US behind closed doors warnings against it to the degree we held the 2024 election 4 months early on 3 weeks notice just to prevent it passing. A truly sovereign Ireland would not wait for permission. It would unilaterally have recognised the State of Palestine decades ago & would have passed the occupied territories bill when it was first proposed . It would uphold international law & ban goods from illegal settlements. This is the litmus test for an independent foreign policy.
& then there is the North, the most glaring symbol of our unfinished business. A truly sovereign foreign policy would view the North not as a “province” of the UK, but as a part of the national territory, as enshrined in our Constitution. It would mean actively planning for the challenges & opportunities of a united Ireland, engaging with all communities in good faith, & making the case for unity based on tangible benefits rather than leaving it as a vague aspiration for a distant future or making nonsense creative accounting excuses about how it would be an “economic drain” all the money we give away to private corporations for the sake of it is a far bigger economic drain with far fewer benefits & our politicians go out of their way to excuse that.
To those who will cry that this vision is anti-American or that it will push us into the arms of Russia or China, the answer is simple: This is not about being anti-anyone. It is about being pro-Irish. The choice is not between Washington & Moscow. The choice is for Dublin, for Cork, For Limerick, for Galway, Even for Waterford & Killkenny. For Derry, For Belfast. Even for Cliffden, Clonmel, even Croom. It is about the gumption of small-power diplomacy. As a small nation, our power lies in moral authority. We should be building coalitions with other small states, advocating for climate justice, & demanding fair trade rules that don’t crush developing economies. This is a path of positive, constructive non-alignment.
Imagine the alternative. Imagine an Ireland that harnesses its wind & wave energy for the public good not Canadian renewables investors. An Ireland with thriving family farms & vibrant towns. With worker owned farms & towns full of factories owned by their workers. An Ireland with world-class public healthcare & secure, affordable housing for all. An Ireland that is a beacon of diplomacy & international justice, respected globally for its independent voice.
This is not a fantasy. It is a choice. It requires us to reject the narrative that we are a small, helpless island at the mercy of global forces. We have the resources, the talent, & the historical mandate. For too long, we have been managing our own subservience. It is time to stop. It is time to get up off of your knees, stop polishing other peoples boots for coppers & finish the fight for a truly independent 32 county Irish Socialist Republic. The first step in achieving that is to join us on the 6th & 7th of March outside the Dail.