HISTORY IS THE BEST TEACHER: The Enemy Is Above Us, Not Among Us
Racism, Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in Ireland – Part 2
As racist violence continues Militant Left member Harry Whelan reflects on the complex lessons from Irish history that we can draw upon in building the anti-racist movement we need to defeat the far-right.
A Nation That Knows Oppression
Ireland’s history has been suppressed and distorted by centuries of British imperialist colonialism. Our culture was branded “backward and barbaric”, our language, our identity and our very humanity dismissed by those who sought to dominate us. And yet, buried within that history, if we are willing to dig deep enough, lie the lessons and the warnings we urgently need today to resolve our societal issues.
Ireland was once known, however imperfectly, as a land relatively untouched by overt, violent racism. Sadly, that reputation is fading very fast. The threat has increasingly become physical, with a surge of men and women being attacked on our streets for the colour of their skin or their country of origin. Yves Sakila’s killing in Dublin City Centre laying down a particularly grim marker. Reports of immigrant populations being assaulted and shamed on camera sprung up throughout 2024 in Limerick. In 2025, an Indian man was stripped, beaten and robbed in Dublin in broad daylight. Pogroms in Belfast just a few weeks ago. Deplorable acts that carry a deeply painful echo of events elsewhere in our history, events we must confront honestly and without flinching.
The Tragedy of the ‘Forgetting Irish’
There is a bitter and instructive chapter in the history of the famous Irish diaspora in America that is often unspoken of. The Irish fleeing famine, colonial dispossession and the crushing violence of British rule arrived in the United States as one of the most despised and dehumanised groups in that society. Equally in Britain they were welcomed identically, as the Irish had long been racialised, depicted in cartoons with ape-like features, dismissed as “white Negroes” and “Negroes turned inside out.” Placards in Britain stated, “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” while in America they stated, “Help Needed, Irish need not apply”. They knew, in their bones, what it was to be treated as subhuman not only within your own national borders but even beyond.
And yet, in America, a portion of that same community made a catastrophic choice. Competing with free Black workers at the bottom of the economic ladder, threatened and frightened, some Irish immigrants chose not solidarity, but collaboration in oppression. They chose to become white. And becoming white meant abandoning the legacy of their own suffering, severing the natural bond with other oppressed peoples, and becoming foot soldiers of the very system that had brutalised them.
The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 stand as the bloodiest urban riot in Irish American history. Irish workers, enraged at conscription into a war they saw as being fought for Black freedom, unleashed a multi-day rampage through the city. Burning the Coloured Orphan Asylum, lynching Black men from lampposts, and attacking every Black person they encountered. It is one of the most shameful episodes in Irish diaspora history. A people fleeing one form of colonial oppression became the instrument of another. When we see racist violence on the streets of Dublin today, we see Irish people replicating the behaviour of our historical oppressors.
The Correct Side of History
We cannot imitate the colonialism and imperialism we have historically detested and resisted. To do so is not just a moral failure, it is a betrayal of everything the long history of Irish resistance to colonialism and imperialism ever stood for.
As our history also offers us countless better examples. The soldiers of Saint Patrick’s Battalion, among them John Riley of Galway, crossed lines during the Mexican American War of 1848 to fight against American imperialism and for the Mexican people. They remained green. They recognised a colonial aggressor when they saw one, because they had lived under one. That is the Irish tradition worth honouring.
Dunne’s Strike
On 19 July 1984, Mary Manning, a 21-year-old cashier at Dunnes Stores on Henry Street in Dublin, refused to scan South African grapefruit at her till, following a union directive to boycott apartheid goods. After being suspended on the spot, her and ten colleagues, mostly young women, mostly teenagers, walked out and onto the picket line. Nimrod Sejake, a South African trade unionist and Militant supporter, living in exile in Ireland, was a regular presence on the picket line. He described apartheid to the strikers in unforgettable terms. Holding up his hand as though gripping a glass, he said: “You have to imagine South Africa as a pint of Guinness, the vast majority of it is black and a tiny minority is white, and like a freshly poured pint, the white sits firmly on top of the black.”
Yet the Irish establishment wanted no part of the struggle against Apartheid South Africa. The then Minister for Industry, John Bruton, pronounced: “The Government should not become involved in any activity designed to restrict imports from South Africa.” In other words, Ireland was making money from the inhumane apartheid system and those in power intended to keep it that way. The strikers held the line for nearly three years through poverty, intense Garda harassment and institutional betrayal. In 1987, their courage forced the Irish Government to ban the importation of all South African goods, making Ireland the first Western European state to do so.
Eleven young Dublin workers armed with nothing but their principles and each other helped bring down one of the most brutal racial regimes in modern history. That is the real Irish tradition of solidarity.
And as proclaimed in the 1991 Dublin film The Commitments, words that still carry truth and fire: “The Irish are the blacks of Europe. Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.” That is not merely a cinematic moment. It is a political statement. Cross-racial, working-class solidarity is not a foreign concept imported into Ireland; it is part of our own story.
The Socialist Tradition We Must Reclaim
We have in our own history a socialist thinker whose analysis even predated Karl Marx but is silenced, in order to not disrupt the ‘inferior’ label placed upon Irish culture. As his brilliant work and analysis speaks with startling precision to our present moment. William Thompson of Cork, wrote in the 1820’s: “If accumulated capital of society remains in one set of hands and the productive power of creating wealth remains in another, the accumulated capital will be made use of in a contradictory manner to the natural laws of distribution and deprive the producers of the use of what their labour has produced.”
That is the system we are living under today. The richest 10% own half of all national wealth. The bottom 50% own less than 10%. This is not an accident or a failure, it is the intended outcome of a capitalist order that places private property rights and profit above human need, every single day.
As the Irish saying reminds us: Providence brought the potato blight, but the English ruling system caused the Famine. Landlords were maintained. Food exports continued. Irish lives were sacrificed to protect British capitalist profits. Any person today who fumes against that historic atrocity whilst defending the capitalist system that produced it, is in the deeply illogical position of denouncing an effect whose cause they actively support.
The system of capitalist property has not changed in its nature, only in its geography. It still selects profit over people. It still manufactures hate and division to protect itself. It still turns the oppressed against one another while the owning class watches safely from above.
The Choice Before Us
We must construct a cross-racial, working-class politics that confronts capitalism at its roots. We must use our history, in all its complexity, its heroism and its shame as our guide. We must fight for a socialist future in which Ireland’s abundant wealth and resources are owned and distributed justly among all who live and work here.
Abandon the reactionary behaviour of blaming those who arrive with less. Replace it with the historic Irish courage that has always struck at the root of oppression unflinchingly, without apology.
Our enemies have never lived below us. They have always lived above us.
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