By Fra Hughes – Feb 26, 2024
It is not the bombs of our enemies that hurt us the most, but the duplicity of our friends and the treachery of their deeds.
For 800 years, the Irish have fought a genocidal British occupation.
Eight centuries of ethnic cleansing, land clearances, massacres, starvation, colonisation, and a brutal military oppression.
Successive generations of Irish men and women, boys and girls, have fought clandestinely and openly to liberate Ireland from foreign imperialist control.
Ireland was Britain’s first conquest.
The British Empire went on to occupy, and even colonise approximately three-quarters of the world’s land mass and citizenry.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, North America, South Africa, Egypt, India, China to name just a few.
The only difference between the British occupation of Ireland and the Zionist occupation of Palestine is one of time and scale.
Ireland endured a British-imposed famine.
In 1847, the ‘potato blight’ destroyed a large percentage of the harvest, leading to a shortage of a basic food staple and a subsequent increase in prices.
Ireland, having been invaded centuries before, was now a land of tenants ruled by absentee landlords. Sections of British aristocracy owned large swathes of Irish land stolen through military occupation.
The Irish were dispossessed of their homes and farms and forced to become almost indentured slaves, tilling the land and raising cattle only for the profits of their labor to be extracted for the largess of a foreign occupier who enacted laws to oppress the indigenous population while protecting the invader.
One law for the occupied, a separate law for the occupier.
Two million died or emigrated. This is why there are Irish communities all over the globe.
54 million North Americans claim to be of Irish descent.
The Irish people were deliberately starved.
Hunger and famine were used as a weapon of war to end ‘ The Irish Question’ at the heart of British politics.
Those who resisted occupation were murdered, imprisoned, or deported as felons to Australia, the Americas, and the Caribbean.
Massacres, land theft, colonisation, famine, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing. These were the weapons of the oppressor.
This is the fate of all people who live under occupation.
This is Ireland’s history. A legacy of suffering before partial liberation.
People in Ireland support people in Palestine. That is a fact.
There is a moral imperative on all people who are suffering or have suffered under foreign occupation or colonisation to support each other.
Ireland gained partial independence in 1922 when Britain withdrew from 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties after a national war of liberation undertaken by the Irish people.
This resulted in the Irish Civil War, where those opposed to partition were then attacked with British guns and British artillery being operated by other Irish men
Imprisonment, torture, and summary executions, once used as tactics of war by the oppressor, were then adopted by pro-partition Irishmen. Once fully embraced, these methods of repression were visited upon the true inheritors of the ideals of a fully independent sovereign Irish Republic, the anti-treaty anti-partition republicans.
Does any of this sound familiar in West Asia?
In 1969, a new generation of oppressed Irish people in the British-created state of Northern Ireland fought to reunify the country.
After 30 years of struggle, a peace deal was agreed between the protagonists, the Irish Republican Movement, the British Government, the Irish Government, and the counter-revolutionary death squads, armed and directed by British intelligence alongside their locally recruited mercenary forces.
Throughout all those years of armed political resistance, the Irish Republican Movement supported their comrades in Palestine.
From the Fedayeen through the PLO to the PA.
Now in N. Ireland, history has been made as, for the first time in the country’s history, an Irish Republican is now First Minister.
A party that I have supported until a decade ago is now in government.
Irish reunification is only a matter of time now.
Sadly, the Irish Republican Movement in the form of Sinn Féin is no longer a radical Republican party.
It is a hollowed-out shadow of its former glory.
Now, a Nationalist constitutional party has embraced the British and Irish establishments along with the trappings of power; although still endorsed by many, it has abandoned its revolutionary roots and embraced neo-liberalism.
There is a growing chorus in Ireland demanding Irish politicians not to attend the traditional St. Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House on March 17, 2024.
While Sinn Féin party members and elected representatives, north and south, attend and even organise or control some of these rallies calling for a ceasefire, they have publicly asserted their intention to go to Washington.
While Sinn Fein and other corporate-endorsed Irish politicians down their shamrock alongside Genocide Joe Biden while posing for selfies, Palestinians will be drowning in their own blood or suffocating slowly to death under the rubble.
As the death toll rises under the bombardment of American imperialist bombs, always remember the treachery of Sinn Fein.
It is not the bombs of our enemies that hurt us the most, but the duplicity of our friends and the treachery of their deeds.
Fra Hughes
Fra Hughes is an Irish political activist, commentator, and author. His most recent books are My Walk with Palestine: an Activist's Taleand Voices from Donbass.
