Lasair Dhearg Easter Summary 2020 [Text/Videos]

Below, we carry the full text of our 2020 Easter Statement as addressed by our public representative Pól Torbóid, including two videos released over the Easter period.

Proclamation of the Irish Republic 1916

Main Easter Address

Statement in full

“O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?

What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell

In the house that I shaped in my heart,”

These words were written by Pádraic Pearse, after the death of his friend and prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.

In June of this year, 105 years will have passed since his death, and since pearse stood by his grave.

“The fools the fools the fools” he said, “they have left us our fenian dead” – a seminal moment in irish history. 

Pearse himself was dead within a year of making the oration, executed in May of 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising.

Along with 13 others, he was shot by a British firing squad in the grounds of Kilmainham Gaol. Two others were to die in the months after in Cork and Pentonville prisons

And though countermanding orders from Eoin MacNeill, commander of the Irish Volunteers, left the Provisional government weakened, 5 days of bloody street fighting saw thousands of irish women and men take on the might of Britain’s empire. 

Their defeat, followed by hundreds of arrests and the subsequent executions of the Republican leadership, awakened an otherwise passive people to demand their freedom. 

And it is at this time of year that we remember, not just those who fought at Easter week, but every generation, in every campaign before and after, who fought for irish freedom. 

We remember, not just those who died, but the countless others who made other sacrifices.

For the consequence of political struggle does not always mean death, though that is often an assured outcome. It also means family. It means time lost with those we loved the most. 

All these things and more, were sacrificed by those who desired something better. By those who saw an injustice in the world and who could not let it pass. 

And so, the greatest injustice of them all. Man’s usurpation of man, maintained as it is by a foreign power, is the foundation upon which our struggle continues. For that question, as long as it remains unresolved, so long as that injustice is perpetuated, so to will the demand for that wrong to be righted. 

And that is the demand we make today. The same that was made by our rebel army in the year of ’69. 

This was the demand made by the columns of women and men who marched through Dublin city one hundred and four years ago. 

And they made that demand, not with votes or with petitions to Westminster. 

No. This demand would be made the way others had made it in generations before them and thereafter. It was a demand made with rifles and with bullets. 

And those rifles. They did not demand devolution of powers to local administrations. 

Their bullets did not ask for powers of taxation. 

They did not envision that their ‘freedom’, would be the freedom to enact British legislation in Ireland. Or that that legislation would strip away the welfare rights of Irish citizens already marginalised and living in poverty. Or indeed to put a tax on their spare bedrooms. 

That demand was made for nothing less than a 32 County Socialist Republic that would cherish all the children of the nation equally. 

And today, that same struggle finds itself in the most unusual of contexts. The Twenty Six county state, having abandoned all vestiges of Republicanism and revolutionary intent long ago, joining other European states in a new fiscal Empire, serves as a warning to those intent in replicating the transition to Government.   Republicans, having handed their weapons to the oppressor, now administer their failed Six County state, supporting and overseeing their neo-liberal economic policies. This, we are told, is the road to freedom we must walk. A road littered with business empires and landlords. Scattered with the dead bodies of a people left behind. A path walked by others before, only to disappear into the cul-de-sac of nationalism, as irish history repeats itself.

This repetitive nature of Irish revolutionary politics, provides a persistent lesson to us all – but it also provides hope. And I can tell you that, having looked into the eyes of many young comrades in recent years, and discussed the future and how to get there, i see hope. I see a fire, and a determination that has eluded us for many years. 

That generation, which will provide the leadership of republicanism in some short years, must do so with all the skill and resources that can be mustered in the here and now.

This year, the first in a new decade, has already given us an indication of the great changes facing the world.

At the time of writing, the coronavirus has devastated the combined economies of the so-called ‘great nations’ of this earth. 

It has plundered our people’s, ripped through now non-existent lines and economic demarcations the world over. It knows no borders. 

One hundred thousand souls and rising.

Those so-called ‘great nations’, have now injected a combined trillions of euros, dollars and pounds into their free market economies, in fiscal stimulus efforts to prevent collapse.

They spent the money that they said they did not have. They found the money they told healthcare workers they didn’t deserve. They acquired the money they told our schools that they couldn’t find.

Those key workers, having stood on picket lines only to be told that they were not worth what they asked for. Now, they stand between us and oblivion,  they fight on our behalf and without the proper tools to do so. In desperate need of proper safety and protection equipment they stepped into the gap anyway.

Our health systems, stripped of beds and workers, were re-invigorated without delay, extra beds made available, to be staffed by extra workers, lest the money men need their help in a time of need.

Private health facilities have come under the glare of state planning, their services requisitioned for a time of need. Though the power of capital reigns supreme, instead of nationalising a much needed service, those key workers who march onward against the virus, will pay for it through taxation. A criminal act by free market governments that will not be forgotten

The virus might kill us, but our governments and capitalism will have let it happen.

It is already clear that healthcare workers will pay a heavier price in this fight against the Covid-19 crisis, than any other. They, like us, will remember Ireland’s dead in a different way. 

The crowds that normally gather at graves across the nation, are now playing their part also, in slowing this crisis down. Instead – they gather at home, maintaining their distance from their neighbours and friends in order to reduce infection. 

As Ireland’s streets lie largely empty, never before has such an event brought so many people together in a single conscientious act of social obligation. 

One thing is clear, The Six and Twenty Six county states have tackled this virus with a great cost to our people. Only an organised economy can effectively tackle a crisis such as this.

So long as we allow the continuation of the free market and capitalist modes of production, the working peoples of this world will continue to literally pay the price for every crisis that the rich allow to happen.

We owe it to every life lost, and to every key worker on the front line of the war against this pandemic, to create an Ireland in their honour. One that will remember the dead – and fight like hell for the living. That will be their epitaph.

We do not crave war.   Instead, we crave an end to the circumstances that sometimes make war necessary.   We crave an end to occupation. An end to poverty, to inequality and injustice. We desire to end the war that already exists.  That which is fought between classes. 

Empires do fall. And tyrannies do perish. A King’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. 

And that same sun, the symbol of a resurgent Irish youth, wiill rise again. 

And so, like Pearse at Rossa’s graveside, we now ask , ‘What if? What if the dream come true?’ 

Join the fight for a Socialist Republic.