The following powerful short speech comes from ‘Frank’, a Militant Left member and active trade unionist who lives on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown. Frank addressed an online meeting of Militant Left members from across the north and south, discussing the ongoing stand‑off between the local Orange Order and the residents of the Garvaghy Road, and the urgent need for working‑class‑based, socialist policies to cut across sectarian division and provide a real alternative.
Last week, thousands of people were on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, and a wound that was supposed to have healed a quarter of a century ago was ripped open in a single late-night court sitting.
Three months before that, the same town burned with anti-migrant riots — a police car in flames, migrant families terrified in their homes. If you want to know the state of working-class politics in Northern Ireland in one sentence, it is this: the same working-class estates are being marched up the hill to fight two different enemies in one summer, and neither enemy is the boss.
Our role as socialists is not to wring our hands about “division.” It is to understand division as a system, and to organise through it and against it.
So let’s be precise. Sectarianism here was not handed down from heaven in godly edicts. It was manufactured. In 1907, Jim Larkin united Catholic and Protestant dockers and carters in Belfast in one of the greatest strikes this island ever saw.
Twelve years later, in 1920, employers and the state organised the expulsion of 10,000 Catholic workers — and socialist Protestants — from the shipyards and engineering works, precisely to break that unity.
Every riot, every expulsion, every pogrom since has had the same function: to make sure the worker with the flute band and the worker with the GAA ticket never look at the same payslip together. That is not ancient hatred. That is divide and rule, and it is a business model.
Stormont’s ‘Power sharing’ system entrenches rather than transcends sectarian division — by institutionalising two opposing blocs, giving each a mutual veto, sidelining non-aligned “Others,” and rewarding intransigence, it produces stalemate and weak, unaccountable power-sharing. Sinn Féin and the DUP may hate each other’s symbolism, but they agree on the economics: low pay, privatisation, underinvestment.
The influence of paramilitaries on both sides- they are not guardians or not liberators, but lumpen controllers of estates, of drugs, of fear, who enforce conformity with the threat of beating or a bullet.
We now have the added factor of an emergent well-funded and externally funded and mobilised far right, which has learned that if the old sectarian card ever weakens, the racist card is the replacement. Same playbook. Different scapegoat.
And running through all of it is transgenerational trauma. We must take this seriously, comrades, because if we don’t, our organising fails. The Garvaghy Road residents who watched the previous Drumcree standoffs are now grandparents and young parents, their children and grandchildren in turn felt it again last Sunday and the trauma will grow if we allow ourselves and our neighbours to fall into the same patterns of beliefs, behaviours and actions.
Trauma makes the tribe feel like safety. It makes compromise feel like betrayal of our dead generations. It makes a politician or organisation with divisive and sectarian views, or the state that has created this division and is creating austerity, poverty and want, sound like a protector.
As socialists we say: healing is not found in a therapist’s chair alone. Solidarity is the therapy. Collective struggle— a strike, a tenants’ campaign, an organised protest and fightback against injustice and oppression is how a traumatised and frightened people rediscover their own power. But we have to organise trauma-informed: no forced contact, no demand that anyone “get over it,” no rushing. Patience is a revolutionary virtue here.
We face considerable barriers in this town and to a large extent across the North. The working class here lives in segregated space: segregated housing, segregated schools, segregated social worlds — so many if not most workers never have the equal-status contact that breaks prejudice. It is organised into two communal blocs competing for scarce resources, so a house or a job feels like a zero-sum sectarian win.
It is policed internally: labels of Lundy, tout, collaborator can be dangerous, not just to the process, but to those who try to seek solidarity and dialogue for a better future. Crossing the line can cost you.
It is ideologically divided by a constitutional question — the Border — that is used to postpone every class question forever. We are not required to immediately agree on the border. We are required to refuse to let the border be the only question, because while we argue about it, the bosses and the landlords and the privatised health service are robbing us all.
So what do we do? The workplace is our front line, and the rank-and-file are our activists. The most integrated space a worker in Northern Ireland ever enters is their job. The trade union is the only mass, cross-community, working-class organisation we have.
Our priority is rank-and-file organising — in the hospitals, the public service, the manufacturing, retail and service industries and in the colleges, universities and schools. Building cross-community caucuses. Fighting every pay dispute as if unity depends on it — because it does. A strike teaches more in one week than ten years of lectures.
Teaching our shared history: 1907, the 1919 engineering strike, the 1932 Belfast Outdoor Relief strike when Catholic and Protestant unemployed fought side by side. We know all too well that our history has been skewed and weaponised to divide, segregate and sectarianise. We can educate and reveal how our shared history been hidden from people.
This is not a question of living in the past but learning from it- the negative and the positive. To quote Maya Angelou: how do we know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been.
We need to focus on building the united front around class demands that cannot be sectarian. Cost of living. Housing: fighting poor housing and evictions on every estate. Anti-austerity in the NHS and schools. Anti-paramilitary. Anti-racist and anti-fascist. Deprivation is colour-blind: it hits the Shankill and the Falls, Corcrain and Garvaghy, identically. Campaign on that, and the orange-and-green card starts to look like what it is: a distraction.
Educating and organising the young: and doing so before the far right and the paramilitaries do. Youth clubs, sport, socialist education, media literacy against online radicalisation. The kids on the streets in June and September are not born fascists or sectarians. They are abandoned. We either give them a movement, or the other side gives them an enemy.
We need independent working-class political representation. We cannot keep lending our votes to one austerity bloc to keep out the other. We need left, cross-community, class-based candidates — and a movement that holds every Stormont party, orange or green, to account for the cuts they vote for.
There must be active promotion of zero tolerance for racism and fascism — full stop. Migrant workers are our fellow workers. They are in our unions, on our picket lines, living on our estates. An injury to one is an injury to all. The far right is the enemy of every worker here, Catholic, Protestant or migrant, and we treat them accordingly.
We must be the most patient, most consistent, least sectarian people in every room; embed in workplaces and estates, supporting cross-community victims’ and ex-combatants’ dialogue. Supporting interface projects and shared housing — but never substituting “good relations” for class politics. We need to meet people where they are: grieve with them, and then organise with them.
Comrades, the next Garvaghy Road will come again. The next anti-migrant riot will be organised. The question is not whether anger exists — it is where it is directed.
Our job is to be organised enough, rooted enough, and trusted enough that when the anger rises, workers turn not on the family down the road with a different flag or a different skin colour, but on the system that made them all poor in the first place.
The people of the Garvaghy Road and the people of the loyalist estates do not need another leader who tells them who to hate. They need a movement that shows them who and what to fight. That movement — our movement — is built one workplace, one estate, one strike, one act of cross-community solidarity at a time.