Lasair Dhearg believes that the Irish people do not need to wait until the establishment of the Socialist Republic to develop the various state institutions required to support it, but that the development of those same institutions in advance, can serve as the catalyst for its eventual establishment. Essentially, providing and developing alternatives to currently existing state bodies, institutions and economic processes, begins the foundation of the Socialist Republic.
This can be applied to all the currently existing state institutions across the island. These include, and are not limited to, health, education, employment, housing, social welfare, policing & justice and arguably more importantly, the economy.
Not-for-profit economic alternatives developed within the community can serve as the catalyst for a new democratic economy, providing goods and services without the added profit margins. Such a venture will no doubt take several years to develop, but in the process of doing so it also becomes a tool of economic education for the wider community, showing that there are alternatives to the current neo-liberal economic system.
This economic alternative serves as the initial stages of the new state economic arrangement. A democratic economy can be developed to the point where there is an effective ‘tipping of the scale’ in favour of it as an economic system, representing a step change in attitudes and favourability toward the old mechanisms of the soon to be defunct state. Increased favourability toward the new and developing system, and the eventual ‘tipping’, marks the beginning of the end of state control over most institutions, given that all state bodies are founded upon the economic processes of society – consequently, if the people take control of the economy, they take control of society. It is on this basis that a new social order is established in favour of the largest class in society – the working class.
This method can be applied across all areas of the state; creation of alternative systems, growth in support of that alternative, support eclipsing and outstripping that of the old order, and eventual establishment of that alternative as the superior system.
Development of community alternatives running parallel to each other, for example Justice & Policing, Housing and Economy, and the consequent increased support for these various non-profit substitutes, would provide the basis of the Socialist Republic. Their very establishment and subsequent growth, would slowly chip away the old order to a position of non-existence. The emerging dominance of a new economic, social and political system would assert itself across Ireland with the creation of a new, united, Socialist Republic.
