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Anthony McIntyre ☠ reviews a podcast for Being Human.

★★★★★

While out canvassing for Catherine Connolly in the Irish Presidential campaign a woman approached, offering to help the team. 

That was how I met Molly Smith. After a brief introduction we set out to rap doors and distribute leaflets while bantering along the route. It came up in conversation that Molly hosted a podcast called Healing Gals. Being a regular podcast reviewer for Being Human, my ears pricked, my curiosity stirred.

Into its sixth season, Healing Gals seeks to explore the trauma and challenges that women endure in life, while at the same time trying to devise workable solutions grounded in lived experience, so that gals may heal. Fiercely critical of ‘the Patriarchy’ - which will diminish its lure for misogynists - it is certainly no call to castrate men but is definitely one to emasculate the negative power that males often use to subjugate the women they seek to dominate.

Molly Smyth’s easy-going chatter and engagements with her guests, many of them friends – in the first season she interviews her mum – detracts nothing from the gravitas she brings to Healing Gals.

The podcast is a frank, at times an uncomfortably candid exercise, given the cruelty women have experienced - often at the hands of abusive partners – but the point Molly Smyth is making is that women need to stand up and simple refuse to take it. Part of this healing process is developing the mettle to openly discuss experiences without shame. Indeed, shame is the core theme of the opening episode in the first season.

This is not the work of some starry-eyed idealist. A Drogheda woman, Molly Smyth knows her subject well and is practical about the advice she offers. And while it might not have been her intention, many men stand to gain from engaging with her work. There is huge number of coping strategies on offer that ranges across the sexes.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Healing Gals

Daily Record 📰 Recommended by Mark Hayes.

Neil Pinkerton partied in Glasgow with loyalist killer and bank robber on shame weekend where far right protest witnessed Nazi salutes and 15 arrests

A sadistic animal hunter is at the heart of efforts by far-right rabble rousers in Ireland to inflame race hate in Scotland.

Neil Pinkerton was among a band of Northern Irish men to travel to Scotland on July 25 to join an anti-immigration event that was badged “Protect Our Women and Children”.

He joined close friends Mark Sinclair, a former UVF bank robber, and sectarian killer Glen Kane, in Glasgow on a weekend of shame when masked figures made Nazi salutes and shouted “get them out”.

Pinkerton can today be revealed as an “urban hunter” who glories in the killing of wild animals with dogs.

He has posted videos and photos of his own dogs being covered in blood after vicious underground fights with foxes, which appeared to have been slaughtered for fun.

Pinkerton and his mates shared a graphic video of one hunt and sickening images of both the dead fox and his bleeding dog.

He captioned his prize photo: “One’s going to feel this in the morning, one’s not”.

Continue @ Daily Record.

Sadistic Irish Animal Hunter Slammed For inflaming Race Hate In Scotland

Caoimhin O’Muraile ⚑ On Friday 14th August I learned with much sorrow of the death former Manchester United, Swansea City, Arsenal, and Aston Villa Goalkeeper, Jimmy Rimmer aged 78.


Jimmy was the understudy to Alex Stepney during his time at Old Trafford where he signed under Matt Busby's treasured youth scheme in 1963. In 1965 he turned professional at United and became the first-choice understudy to the undisputed first choice keeper, Alex Stepney. 

I remember my early years at Old Trafford watching United on 5th September 1970, a game we won 2-0 with goals from Bobby Charlton and George Best against Coventry City. I remember Jimmy in goal because I was expecting Alex Stepney to be between the sticks. I panicked, was apprehensive, because we had a reserve keeper, but Rimmer played well that day from what I can remember. It was a lot for a nine-year old to take on the day, but Ido recall vividly Jimmy Rimmer instead of Alex Stepney in the nets and having a good game. 

It was rumoured at one point that he might succeed Alex as first choice keeper due to Stepney going through a bad patch. It was for this reason, Rimmer keeping goal at a very early game for me, that I remember in 1974, February, Tommy Docherty selling him to Arsenal for £40,000 where he was seen as the long-term answer to replace Bob Wilson. When Wilson retired Rimmer became Arsenal's first choice Goalkeeper for the next three years. While he was at Old Trafford Jimmy made 46 appearances for United in all competitions and I saw him the once. 

In those days football fans were different to today’s variant, who seem to support every team under the sun, not proper fans at all really. Once a player left Old Trafford not a great deal of attention would be given because that player was no longer a Man United man. Fans were very territorial and tribal back then and former players - Best, Charlton, and Law exempted, they were untouchable - were often quickly forgotten after leaving. For me Jimmy was different because of that game in September 1970, surprising me with his inclusion in Stepney’s absence - it was something which stuck in my mind.

Jimmy Rimmer was Matt Busby’s substitute in the 1968 European Champions Cup against Benfica at Wembley earning himself a European Cup Winners medal, the first of two European Cup Winners medals he would receive and for two different teams. Manchester United won that glorious night defeating Benfica, Eusebio, Graca, Torres and all, 4-1 becoming the first English team to lift the trophy.

Back in the 1970s and 80s Old Trafford was a very intimidating ground for opposition players and fans alike. The opposition goalkeeper was subjected to psychological treatment by the Stretford End particularly if they were defending that goal in the second half. The massed ranks of supporters would give phoney applause to the opponents Keeper and when the unfortunate waved to the terracing he would be met in unison with loud boos and Fuck Off. Mervyn Day, West Ham goalie in 1976, came in for some stick from the Stretford End with chants of ‘Mervyn, Mervyn it’s not your day’ as the Hammers lost 4-0. Another chant Day suffered was, to the air of a Gary Glitter song, It’s Good to be Back, ‘what a Gay Day, what a Gay Day hello, hello’ at a time when the word ‘Gay’ was used derogatory towards homosexuals, something which had evolved in the early seventies. During the sixties the same word, Gay, was used in everyday conversation even positively in some football chants. There was no such treatment for Jimmy Rimmer when he appeared for Arsenal or Aston Villa and he was remembered for his days as a stand in Keeper at Old Trafford and never moaned. Despite making only 46 appearances Jimmy will be remembered at Old Trafford just as he will at Arsenal and Villa Park. While at Highbury he earned one England international Cap in a friendly against Italy in 1976.

Jimmy’s career at United was spent as an understudy goalkeeper to the regular choice of the time, Alex Stepney, a situation which could not go on indefinitely. He was a better keeper than an understudy. He was sent on loan to Swansea City and then in 1974 sold to Arsenal where he made 146 appearances and winning the Gunners Player of the Year award in 1975. From Arsenal he transferred to Aston Villa in 1977 where he was first choice keeper until his departure in 1983 to Swansea City not on loan this time. He was instrumental in Villa winning the First Division in 1980-81 and the following year he helped Aston Villa win the European Cup defeating Bayern Munich 1-0. Jimmy played in every round of Europe’s premier competition for Villa and started the Final. He was very unfortunate that evening suffering a shoulder injury after just nine minutes and having to leave the pitch. He was substituted by Nigel Spink who, despite having had very limited first team experience, played exceptionally well that night in Rotterdam. Jimmy received his second European Cup Winners medal that night after his 1968 honour. The irony was that he won two European Cup Winners medals despite playing only nine minutes football through no fault of his own.

Jimmy Rimmer was born in Southport, then in Lancashire,  before the boundary and name changes, on 10th February 1948 so he was considered a local lad when he joined United. Southport is around 35 miles from Manchester and he just about qualified as local. By today’s standards he was very local indeed! Southport today is part of Merseyside, the Metropolitan District of Sefton to be precise. He died after a fall at his home in Swansea on 14th August 2026 aged 78.

My own memories of Jimmy Rimmer are sketchy due to the small number of appearances he made for Man United. I was lucky enough to be at one of those games and despite initially being disappointed due to Akex Stepney’s absence was pleased with what I saw in our reserve keeper. I knew that in any future games where Stepney may be injured a safe pair of hands was more than able to cover. 

Towards the end of his career jimmy was appointed goalkeeping coach at Vetch Field then home to Swansea City. The memory of Jimmy Rimmer epitomised initially by disappointment back in 1970 turning to admiration and support as a safe pair of hands in reserve applied to many young fans as I then was. For me his death signifies another fond childhood memory as the players from that era one by one pass on.

RIP Jimmy Rimmer and thank you for the memory.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Jimmy Rimmer

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Sixty Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 3239

Dixie Elliot ✊shares memories of Michael 'Red Mick' Devine on the anniversary of his death on hunger strike. 


I met Volunteer Michael Devine, known as Red Mick in H2, shortly before my own trial in a Diplock Court, which had been set for June of that year, 1977.

We bonded because of the fact that we were both from Derry. I knew virtually nothing about socialism until I began to walk the exercise yard with Red Mick. I'm told that his nickname came more from the fact that he had red hair than from his socialist convictions, not that there would ever be any doubt about those.
 
He was born in Springtown Camp on 26th May 1954. The camp had formerly been a World War II US Navy/Army base which was situated on the outskirts of Derry between the Buncrana Road and the Northland Road. It consisted of corrugated iron Nissen huts; much like the ones which would be erected in Long Kesh for the Internees in the early 1970s.

In later life Mick would refer to Springtown Camp as "the slum to end all slums." During the bitter cold months of winter parents would stack coats over their children to protect him from the cold. When he was six years of age, the Devine family, including his grandmother, sister Margaret and parents Patrick and Elizabeth, moved to Creggan estate.

The poverty and living conditions he and his family experienced, in what was more or less a shanty town, lit a revolutionary flame in the heart of young Michael Devine. What he witnessed first-hand on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972 further fanned the flame of freedom and he would go on to become a founder/member of the Irish National Liberation Army.
 
After spending two weeks in H2 I was sent back to Crumlin Road Gaol for my trial. Even though we both went on the Blanket Protest I never met Mick again. He joined the 1981 hunger strike and died at 7.50 am on Thursday, August 20th, the 10th and last hunger striker to die.
 
Fuair sé bás ar son saoirse na hÉireann.

"If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine." - Ernesto Che Guevara.

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

INLA Volunteer Michael 'Red Mick' Devine

Remembering Michael Devine On The 45th Anniversary Of His Death On Hunger Strike In The H Blocks Of Long Kesh.

Michael Devine 45 🏴 Eternal Dreamless Sleep

Jim Duffy ✍ JFK secretly wired his own Oval Office in 1962. 

A hidden switch by his knee triggered a reel-to-reel recorder Secret Service agent Robert Bouck built into the room that July. By November 1963 it held some 260 hours of Cabinet Room strategy and private calls, a self-made record he never explained. Historians still argue over why he really started taping.

His recordings are a fascinating insight to the man. His phone calls to his predecessor, General Eisenhower, show an open-minded leader consulting his wise and experienced predecessor. His respect for the general, and the general's respect for him, come across strongly.
 
When Kennedy was elected, Eisenhower privately disparaged the new president as "the boy." Eisenhower's vice-president, Richard Nixon, whom Kennedy had beaten in the election, was a long-time friend of Kennedy. He told Eisenhower that Kennedy may be inexperienced but he was one of the most brilliant people he, Nixon, had ever known, and predicted Eisenhower would soon be impressed by him. Eisenhower quickly changed his opinion of Kennedy and really valued their phone calls. At JFK's funeral, Mrs Kennedy told Eisenhower how much Jack valued their chats.
 
The recordings paint an impressive picture of Kennedy as competent, always reading and learning, and being a deep strategic thinker. I am struck with the way Kennedy recorded his calls, showing him warts and all. In contract, Irish cabinet minutes are extremely uninformative and don't recall who said what.
Leaders should be able to record all their phone calls so how decisions are taken become obvious. Obviously, security issues need to be strictly embargoes. One Kennedy call shows an angry Kennedy furious at what had been delivered to the White House to equip it for the birth of son. Sadly his son died. It showed a different side to Kennedy - not a president but a husband and father fiercely protective of his wife and soon-to-be-born son.
 
Kennedy died before his legacy had been settled. The calls show the immense ability snuffed out in Dallas in November 1963. The calls prove Nixon correct in describing Kennedy as a man of exceptional ability and a deep thinker.
 
It is fascinating to think that the US in 1960 had a presidential election where two close friends ran against each other. They were so close that when Kennedy's back pain got too bad during all night meetings of Congress Kennedy would go to Nixon's office to sleep on the couch as it was far nearer than his own.
 
In one election Kennedy came into Nixon's office to say his father wanted to donate to Nixon's congressional campaign. Nixon suspected it was really a donation from Jack himself, but as a Democrat he couldn't be seen donating to a GOP candidate.
 
Nixon was invited to attend Kennedy's wedding but due to a prior commitment couldn't attend. Nixon's obvious affection for Kennedy came across in interviews in retirement. They were elected to Congress at the same time as each other, sat on many of the same committees and co-operated closely.
 
At the time close friendships across parties were commonplace. They could disagree but it did not become personal, like John McCain, Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham. They completely disagreed on things but were very close friends. That is how politics and life should be. Left wing firebrand Aneurin Bevan and King George VI were close friends. They bonded over both having crippling stutters. Bevan's famed bombastic style of speaking was his way of controlling his stutter.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Friendship In Politics

Daily Kos ★ Written By Thom Hartmann. Recommended by Gary Robertson. 

People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights. —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times

Terrible things are happening outside… poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943

Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.”

Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins by the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.

Continue @ Daily Kos. 

The Monsters Are Rebuilding A World Where Dark-Skinned Humans Don’t Count

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 17-August-2026.

Everyone is arguing about why Sinn Féin’s Stormont term has failed. The answer, and the only way out, both run through South Africa.

Photo by Osama Madlom on Unsplash

Designed to Exist, Not to Excel

In late July 2026, at the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Donegal, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party said something truer than he knew. Jon Burrows said Stormont had been built by the architects of the Good Friday Agreement to exist rather than to excel, loaded with every check and balance its makers could devise, so that it would run without collapsing rather than govern well. He meant it as an explanation for why nothing much gets done there. The numbers bear him out: the political correspondent Gavan Reilly has calculated that the institutions have been suspended for almost 10 cumulative years since 1998, 37% of their existence spent not existing. Burrows was right about the machine. He was only wrong about what the machine holds.

Because that is the question consuming many columns, blogs, podcasts and brains thinking about the north this summer: why nothing much gets done, and specifically why Sinn Féin, nine months from an Assembly election and freshly arrived at a five-year low in the polls, has so little to show for a full term at the head of the Executive. 

Two answers are on the table. The first, and by now the settled verdict of the commentariat, is incompetence. Muiris Ó Súilleabháin argued it most fully in The Pensive Quill this month; Wee Sambo McBride, in the Sunday Independent, put it flattest, that in a couple of areas the party can blame the DUP but the main problem is deep incompetence. Bills badly drafted, ministers floundering under questioning, a flagship policy reversed inside a day, ambitions shrunk to potholes and road resurfacing schemes. The second answer, offered nightly by the party’s opponents, is sabotage: the old wreckers, in office at last, wrecking still.

There is a third answer. It is the one nobody making the running wants, because it is the only one whose remedy is not a change of the personnel.

The Two Cures That Are the Same Cure

Notice what the incompetence reading and the sabotage reading have in common. Both put the failure down to the people. If the problem is incompetence, the cure is better people. If the problem is sabotage, the cure is removing the saboteurs, which the party’s opponents have always wanted. Two diagnoses, one prescription: change who is in the room. And that is precisely the conversation Sinn Féin is now having with itself, with people who defended every leadership decision for years now calling for a change of leader, a change of strategy, or both.

The third answer says it would change nothing. It says a party holding these particular offices, under these particular vetoes, invested as deeply as this one is in institutions it can neither transform nor leave, produces this record under any leadership, because the design produces it and not the personalities. Burrows was right that the machine was built to exist rather than excel. What he did not say, is that the same design does something to the party that leads it. It does not only stop the institutions working. It holds the party still.

The Specimen

Watch the mechanism work, in a single document.

This month the party’s national chairperson, Declan Kearney, published a long indictment of the DUP in the Irish News. It is a competent piece of work, and I choose that word carefully, because it is not the writing of a party that cannot make its case. It names DUP arrogance, sectarianism and what it calls economic illiteracy. It sets out the blocking of the Good Jobs Bill as an assault on workers’ rights. It cites the loss of European funding, the cut to Invest NI’s budget, the RHI scandal, the whole ledger, thorough and dated and signed.

And it asks for nothing. After the entire indictment, the demand is that the DUP change course, choose power-sharing, abandon its wrecker’s agenda. There is no consequence named for refusal, no leverage identified, no account of what Sinn Féin will do if the other party simply declines. The chairperson of the largest party in the north writes a full charge sheet against the second largest and closes by asking it, please, to behave differently.

This is not incompetence at writing indictments. It is the opposite. It is a party grown fluent in diagnosis precisely because diagnosis is the move fully available to it, and the remedies are not. You can read the shape of the enclosure in the shape of the complaint: total complaint, tiny ask, because everything in between, every step that might actually change the outcome, runs into a wall the party itself helped to build.

The Machine, Not The Man

Set two more documents beside Kearney’s, from the same fortnight.

At Hillsborough at the end of July, the Sinn Féin senator Conor Murphy, until last year the 6C Economy Minister, warned that the institutions were in a precarious place and the wheels could come off if the DUP would not engage. Days later the First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, accused the DUP of an approach that was anti-Irish and bent on frustrating progress. Then, on the Tuesday, the 6C Finance Minister John O’Dowd was asked the obvious question and answered that his party had no intent, plan or otherwise to walk away from the Executive.

Read those three in sequence. The wheels could come off; the DUP is anti-Irish; we are going nowhere. The threat and its disavowal, issued by the same party in the same news cycle. This is not a party deciding whether to bring the institutions down. It is a party performing the consideration of a thing it has already ruled out, because the performance is the only pressure available to it, and even the performance must be recalled within the week in case anyone mistakes it for a plan.

There is truth in the party’s complaint, and it deserves its full weight. The DUP does obstruct. It sat on the Good Jobs Bill. The vetoes are real, and Brian Feeney, no enemy of Sinn Féin, puts the strongest version of the party’s defence: that when the DUP 6C Education Minister diverts money from Irish-medium schools to the mainstream sector and the Sinn Féin base demands retaliation, the leadership’s refusal to fight a discriminatory tit-for-tat produces a genuine sense of powerlessness. That is fair, and it is real.

But powerlessness that is structurally produced is not the refutation of the third answer. It is the third answer. A party that cannot retaliate without becoming the thing it opposes, and cannot deliver without the consent of the party it denounces, and cannot leave without owning the wreckage, is a contained party whether it walked into the trap knowingly or not. Feeney describes the walls exactly. He simply does not call them a cage.

And the deeper point is the one the party’s own framing hides. Sinn Féin presents DUP obstruction as a thing done to it. But the antagonism serves both front benches. The DUP needs a nationalist threat to rally a fracturing unionism; Sinn Féin needs a unionist wrecker to explain a barren term and hold a slipping base. Each party’s electoral interest is served by the other’s intransigence, which is why the managed hostility survives two decades and never quite resolves and never quite collapses. It is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system, working as designed. And it has a start date. As Reilly notes, when Sinn Féin collapsed the Executive in 2017 over the cash-for-ash scandal, it changed the rules of the place: no longer would the institutions fall only at some genuine constitutional impasse, but, from then on, for the same everyday electoral reasons as any coalition anywhere. Both elections since have been triggered by a governing party pulling the plug for advantage. The threat is now a routine instrument, and both parties know how to reach for it.

The strongest objection to all this is now argued on the nationalist left: that the equilibrium is breaking, because the DUP no longer wants the institutions to survive. With the Donaldson scandal unresolved and the census trending against unionism, the argument runs, the party has decided Stormont is a losing proposition, and is hammering the cultural flashpoints, Irish language signage, Casement, precisely to goad Sinn Féin into collapsing it, since the party that pulls the plug is the party the electorate punishes. Grant it in full, and notice it does not loosen the cage. It tightens it. The gambit only works if Sinn Féin will not walk, which O’Dowd confirmed within the week; you can only bait a party into collapse if you know it is desperate not to. The escalation is not evidence against containment. It is containment weaponised: one party has read the other’s cage and begun rattling the bars, confident the door will stay shut from the inside.

What the Veto Does Not Explain

The obstruction is the party’s alibi, and the way to test an alibi is to find the cases where there is no obstructor at all.

Take the A5, the road between Derry and Aughnacloy where more than 50 people have died since 2006. It has not been built, and the reason usually given is a court ruling: a judge found in 2025 that the scheme breached the north’s Climate Change Act, the Act the Executive itself passed in 2022. Sinn Féin’s 6C infrastructure minister is appealing. But strip the case to its frame and there is no unionist in it. Every party in the Executive has offered to amend the climate law to let the road proceed. The obstacle is that Sinn Féin passed a climate Act it is proud of and promised a road it cannot now build without unpicking that Act, and either choice costs it with a different half of its own coalition: the urban, younger, greener voters who want the targets, and the rural western voters who want the road. So it appeals to the court and waits, because the court is the one place a party can send a decision it does not want to make itself. It is not the DUP. It is a party colliding with the incompatibility of its own promises, and choosing paralysis over either bill. Strip the unionist out of almost any of these rows, the student-number cap that no party will lift because none will raise fees, the budget that cannot be set, and the same shape recurs: the machine refusing to move, with a Sinn Féin hand resting on a control that will not turn. Not incompetence, and not sabotage.

The Falsifier That Did Not Fire

If the third answer is wrong, there is a clean way to prove it. If the failure is really a matter of personnel, a change of course would follow from the diagnosis the party itself has published, and the remedy that fits its own charge sheet has now been named, in print, by a sympathetic hand. Brian Feeney has argued that after next year’s election Sinn Féin should renew its mandate as the largest party but decline to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria by which it would call a border poll. Not a walkout, which Feeney explicitly rejects as leverage thrown away, but a condition: no return to office until the terms of the constitutional question are on paper.

It is the move that follows if you take the diagnosis seriously, and it is the move the party will not make. O’Neill has spent the summer publicly recommitting to the very institutions her chairman describes as wrecked. O’Dowd has ruled out even the leverage. The party has looked directly at the one remedy consistent with its own analysis and declined it, in front of its own base, in the worst polling of its northern life.

Why? Because the remedy is not a personnel move. It is a decision about the institutions themselves, and a party contained by those institutions cannot make one. It has invested too much to transform them and cannot leave them without owning the instability that follows. That is not a failure of nerve a braver leader or a sharper minister would fix. It is the structural position, and it would hold whoever stood in O’Neill’s place.

What New People Cannot Fix

So the conversation the party is having with itself, about leadership and strategy and whether McDonald should stay and who might do the northern job better, is a conversation about the wrong thing. It assumes the record is a personnel problem. Change the people, sharpen the message, turn up to the studios, and the term after next will look different.

It will not. The party will produce new faces and the same record, because the faces were never the constraint. The constraint is a set of institutions built to exist and not to excel, entered by a party that can now neither transform them nor leave them. Ó Súilleabháin, who has watched this from far closer than most ever will, puts it in a phrase I will borrow once and not try to improve: the revolutionary has become the custodian. What his incompetence reading stops short of is why. Not a loss of edge or talent, but the plain fact that the institutions reward custodianship and punish everything else, and the party chose to walk in and hold office rather than stay out and hold nothing.

That is the diagnosis. It would be a poor essay that stopped there, because a diagnosis with no way out is just a more sophisticated despair. So the harder question: is there a way out of the cage, and has anyone ever found one?

The Ones Who Tried

There is a way out, but the record of everyone who has reached for it is a warning before it is an encouragement, and the warning has to be heard first.

What Sinn Féin is ultimately trying to do, change the constitutional status of a territory by consent, through the ballot box, from inside the institutions of the state it wants to leave, has been attempted before and has mostly failed. Quebec is the sharpest case. The Parti Québécois governed the province and controlled the timing of its own referendums, advantages Sinn Féin can only dream of, and in 1995 it lost by half a percentage point on a turnout of 93%. Then the defeat did its work: the party slid from 43% in 1998 to 15% and 3 seats by 2022, its worst ever. Coming within a whisker of a state and losing did not just fail to deliver the country. It broke the movement for a generation. Scotland tells the same story: the referendum won in 2014, lost 55% to 45%, and then the question frozen, because Westminster declined a second vote and the courts confirmed there was no route to one without London’s consent.

Lay the northern numbers over that pattern. Support for a united Ireland in the north sits at around 34% on the most careful polling, risen from 27% but pointing, on the pollsters’ own reading, to a referendum that would be soundly defeated. The newest single survey put it lower and falling. A border poll held now loses, and a border poll lost freezes the question for a generation. This is the trap folded inside the cage: the movement most desperate for the vote is the movement most tempted to call it before it can be won, because the base wants it and the story requires it. That temptation is how you turn a bad decade into a lost generation.

The One Who Did It

There is one movement that reached this exact objective and held it, and everything worth learning is in how.

South Africa. A liberation movement that had waged an armed struggle achieved the total constitutional transformation of its state and took power without civil war. Republicans reach for the comparison often, and usually for the wrong part of it. The lesson is not the struggle and it is not the moral victory. It is the settlement, and specifically the concessions. The African National Congress did not win by defeating its enemy. Joe Slovo, the guerrilla leader who did more than anyone to design the transition, wrote that they were negotiating with a regime that could no longer rule as before but was “not a defeated enemy”. Neither side could impose, so the movement won the other side’s consent by guaranteeing the minority a stake: a government of national unity for a fixed term, posts shared by proportion of the vote, protected employment for the overwhelmingly white civil service. Slovo sold it to a furious base by insisting that a concession which looked like a trap was the price of a transition they could not otherwise force. The movement guaranteed the very people it had every reason to punish, because the guarantee was what made majority rule acceptable to them.

Two other things carried it. It was never only the party: the accord that opened the road was signed by the government and a wide front of unions and churches and civic bodies, far larger than the ANC alone. And Slovo understood the danger inside his own movement, warning that a leadership which hid the necessary compromises from its supporters would in the end be accused of selling out. The honesty was part of the strategy.

What Would Have to Be Given

Hold South Africa against the northern case and the way out takes a shape the party will not like, which is exactly why it is the way out and not another comfort.

First, the referendum is the finish line, not the starting gun, and it is run once. Everything the movement can control happens before the vote. A concrete, costed prospectus for what a new Ireland would be, its health service, its pensions, its constitution, its guarantees, is not a distraction from the campaign. It is the campaign, and it is the work the office leaves no time for, because the office rewards the daily performance of grievance over the slow labour of preparation.

Second, and this is the sunset-clause lesson, you win by guaranteeing the minority, not by outnumbering it. The one number in the northern polling genuinely moving in the right direction is not the headline unity figure, which is flat or falling. It is unionist consent: the willingness of unionists even to accept a result they would lose has begun, measurably, to rise. That is the South African mechanism showing its first Irish pulse, and it is the only variable that describes a durable yes. An offer addressed to unionists with real guarantees, of their institutions and their identity and their place, is not a betrayal of the objective. It is the only version of it that has ever worked anywhere.

Third, it cannot be the party’s possession. The South African transformation was carried by a front far wider than the ANC, and the northern unity project is understood, fatally, as Sinn Féin’s property. The party that fought the war cannot be the party that reassures the people it fought. A civic movement, cross-party and cross-community, holding the preparation and making the guarantees, is not a threat to the goal. It is the only vehicle for it.

Notice what every one of those three requires. Preparation over agitation, guarantees over numbers, a front instead of a party: each is the precise opposite of what the office rewards, which is administration and grievance, the daily holding of the base. The revolutionary became the custodian, and the custodian cannot prepare the revolution, because being the custodian is a full-time job.

The Front It Can Only Build of Itself

This is not a hypothetical, and to the party’s credit it is not asleep. In the middle of August, in An Phoblacht, Declan Kearney published the fullest statement of intent the unity project has produced in years, and it should be met as one. It names the Fleadh as proof the north has changed, invites unionists to join the debate, insists that Protestant and unionist people must have a fundamental influence in the creation and governance of a united Ireland, and calls for something concrete: a single forum in which, in his own phrase, all strands of “Irish national democratic opinion” would gather to deliberate, agree, and then speak as one on how to plan the transition. He models it, more than once, on the Hume-Adams initiative of the late 1980s.

Take it seriously and it is the first real attempt to do what the third lesson demands, to move the project beyond the party and formalise a shared position. And the honest objection is not that self-organisation is illegitimate. It is exactly what the liberation movement in South Africa did first: the Harare Declaration, the internal front, the unions and civics agreeing their own position years before they sat across from the regime. A movement is entitled to work out what it thinks before it negotiates. So far, Kearney is on solid ground, and an essay that jeered at a movement for organising itself would be a dishonest one.

The distinction is what the self-organisation is a step toward, and here the two roads part completely. In South Africa the movement’s own front was never, from within, a front of one community: the Congress tradition was non-racial by principle, so the voice that spoke already contained members of the minority it would later reassure. And that front was a prelude, not the venue. It gave way to a genuine multi-party negotiation, where the National Party and Inkatha and white interests sat as full parties with real standing, and to a peace accord the outgoing regime itself signed. The minority co-authored the settlement; it was not its audience. The single voice dissolved, deliberately, into a table where the other side could say no.

There is no second stage in Kearney’s account. The forum gathers, agrees, and speaks as one, and that single voice is offered to unionism from across a threshold, not worked out with unionism inside the room. Protestants are invited to the debate; the body that deliberates and decides is defined, in his own phrase, by the one tradition. And this is not a generosity he could add by inviting more people, which is the point that turns the whole essay. The ANC could hold the minority within its own ranks because its founding principle was a single non-racial people. Nationalism cannot hold unionists within a forum of national democratic opinion without dissolving the very thing unionism is, because unionism is precisely the refusal of that category. The boundary of the forum is not a failure of reach. It is structural. When the unity project sets out to build a front, the only front it can convene is a front of itself.

So here, at the level of the whole movement, is the cage one last time, and its deepest instance. The guarantee that would win, the one made with the minority at the table, cannot be issued by a party whose forum the minority stands outside by definition. The party that fought the war reaches, sincerely, for the front that wins, and its hand closes on a convention of its own tradition, chaired in its own paper, over its own president’s meetings, speaking with one voice that can only ever be its own. It has built the first half of the South African road and named it the whole journey. Not because Declan Kearney lacks the wit to see the difference, but because the office and the tradition that hold him leave no other front within reach.

The way out is real, then, and narrow, and no comparison is a template: South Africa was a demographic majority claiming power it was owed, and northern nationalism is not a majority, not yet anyway, and maybe not even soon. The path has been walked once, in far harder conditions than these, by a movement that guaranteed its enemy and prepared for years and made itself larger than a party. The keys are in Sinn Féin’s own hand. They have always been able to open the door out. What they cannot do, while the office holds them, is stop mistaking the warmth of the cell for the freedom of the house.

References

1. Jon Burrows, address to the Patrick MacGill Summer School, 25 July 2026 (“designed to exist, not to excel”). Reported in the Irish Times.

2. Gavan Reilly, “37% of the time, Stormont hasn’t existed,” The Journal, “Politics by Numbers” series, August 2026 (the 37% cumulative-suspension figure; the 2017 Rubicon framing).

3. Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, “Hope Springs Eternal,” The Pensive Quill, August 2026 (the incompetence reading; “the revolutionary has become the custodian”).

4. Sam McBride, Sunday Independent, August 2026 (competence as the “main problem”; discussed in Cedar Lounge Revolution).

5. Declan Kearney, “Time for a new initiative on Irish unity,” An Phoblacht, 14 August 2026 (the DUP indictment; the call for a single forum of “Irish national democratic opinion”; the Hume-Adams model; unionist and Protestant influence in a united Ireland).

6. Conor Murphy, remarks at Hillsborough, late July 2026 (institutions “precarious,” “wheels could come off”).

7. Michelle O’Neill, remarks on the DUP, 6 August 2026 (“anti-Irish,” “frustrating progress”).

8. John O’Dowd, 11 August 2026 (“no intent, plan or otherwise”).

9. Brian Feeney, Irish News, August 2026 (the “sense of powerlessness”; the conditional-re-entry proposal tied to publication of border-poll criteria).

10. A5 Western Transport Corridor: High Court ruling on Climate Change Act (2022) grounds, 2025; ministerial appeal.

11. ARINS / Irish Times North-South Survey (North 34% for unity, released February 2025); Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool poll (June 2026, North 35.8%); the rising-unionist-consent finding, ARINS.

12. Quebec referendum, 30 October 1995 (49.42% Yes); Parti Québécois decline to 2022. Scottish independence referendum, 18 September 2014 (44.7% Yes).

13. Joe Slovo, “Negotiations: What Room for Compromise?” (African Communist, 1992), and the sunset-clause / Government of National Unity framework; the National Peace Accord, 1991.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

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