‘The situation in the North of Ireland remains a colonial one’: An interview with Odrán de Bhaldraithe
Ahead of its publication on the 22nd of June, Louis Allday spoke to Odrán de Bhaldraithe about Neglect in the North of Ireland, a book that details the manifest neglect in the North’s economy, its politics, housing, and healthcare, the root of which is clear: British rule.
Louis Allday: Odrán, firstly let me congratulate you on the book. It is a brilliant and important read. One thing that struck me as I read it is that despite its relative brevity, it is a very rich book and the depth of your knowledge shines through consistently. Could you perhaps introduce yourself briefly and explain how you are in a position to have written such an authoritative and informed account?
Odrán de Bhaldraithe: Thank you very much, Louis. I was delighted when Ebb asked me to write the book last year and am now delighted to get it out there in the world.
I suppose I am in a position to do this firstly because of the family I had the good fortune to be born into; my mother is from south Derry, a republican stronghold, and my father’s family were republicans too. Anyone who can understand Irish will see at the start of the book that it is dedicated to ancestors on both sides of my family who participated in various stages of the Irish revolutionary struggle, from the Tan War that ended with partition to the latest stage known as the Troubles. I was born in 1994, so I am too young to remember the days of soldiers and checkpoints, even if I was alive during the last of them, but my older siblings remember them on our constant trips back to Derry.
Our parents made sure that we understood from birth that the difference between where we lived in Kilkenny and where our cousins and grandparents lived was not a natural thing, that it was an illegitimate separation of a country by a foreign power. In our house, we were raised to understand that Ireland is all of Ireland, no matter what anyone says, that nobody could tell us – and people did constantly do this in the South – that we were somehow less Irish since all of us had been born in the North, and that we should never allow the partition of our country to become normalised in our own minds by doing things like using the imperial nomenclature of the Northern state or accepting the Southern argument that the 26-county state is ‘Ireland’. I don’t by any means think that all of my siblings would agree with every word in the book, but we are all principled republicans in one form or another thanks to our parents. That we all managed to come through being raised in the South, where republican opinions and Northern affiliations were often met with hostility, and hold onto those principles, is no mean feat on their parts.
Because of this upbringing, I would say that I actually came to the intellectualisation of my republicanism quite late. I had never really read much of the writers I do now and cite in the book because I felt that I knew my principles, I felt that I knew what being a republican was and meant to me and so I was better served reading other things, things I didn’t know. I would say that I became a Marxist in my early 20s and it was only really when I wondered how to fuse these two ideologies I subscribed to – Marxism and Irish republicanism – that I began to realise the breadth and depth of material out there doing just that.
In terms of having the authority to cover the day-to-day running of the North as I do in the economic and political chapters of the book, I am a full-time journalist in my day job and I cover both governments in Ireland. What is in the book is the bread and butter of what I deal with every day when covering the North; I chose to focus on healthcare, education, and housing in the sectoral analysis but from month to month, I could be covering anything such as environmental policy, planning, infrastructure, etc. Because of my job, I am minutely aware of how every sector of public life in the North is failing the people here. Of course, the latest budget unveiled by the British Government will only worsen that; every department but two saw funding cuts in cash terms and every department was given a funding cut in real terms.
LA: Another thing that struck me repeatedly while reading the book was the very thing that had already formed a significant part of Ebb's motivation in publishing something like this about Ireland: the extent to which that, despite its (literal) closeness to home, the issue has often been – and continues to be – largely ignored, or worse, by much of the UK left. Is this gap something that you had in mind while writing it? And beyond that, who do you see as its audience? Who do you think should read this book?
OB: I am a constant critic of Irish people who angle their work – be it political, artistic, or otherwise – toward either Britain or America and so I would be both lying and hypocritical if I said that I had the British left in mind while writing the book. This, of course, isn’t to say that I don’t want members of the British left to read my work, having such an attitude would be odd for someone publishing with an English publisher. I can’t remember who said it but I remember once reading a writer stating his belief that Irish literature should be a conversation amongst ourselves, and if others wanted to listen in, then all the better. That’s how I approached the writing of this book. I aimed at Ireland and if that helps anyone in or out of Ireland, then I’m delighted to be of some use.
While the book is obviously aimed at Ireland, I don’t see its audience as strictly Irish. I think in one sense or another, many left movements are left to grapple with the kind of issues that are identified and criticised within the book and so I think it can be of use to anyone looking to develop a critical framework for dealing with once-revolutionary movements lurching towards reformism and, inevitably, the status quo.
I do, however, hope that the book is read by people within the British and American left because something I have found in leftist Anglophone media is the complacent assumption that Sinn Féin is the same Sinn Féin of the 1980s and that their recent electoral surges are some harbingers of revolution in Ireland. I think this book, and many of the books cited in it, could be good guides for those who are mistakenly of that belief.
LA: I very much liked your notes around terminology and framing at the opening of the book, especially your clear explanation with regards to the fact that the situation in the North of Ireland remains a colonial one. Could you perhaps outline your position on that point briefly, because I think it is a vital one.
OB: In the most basic sense, a colony is defined as ‘a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country’; this accurately describes the situation in the North. Everything in the North is ultimately under the control of the Westminster government; there is a constituent Assembly but it’s basically a glorified local council with no tax-raising powers. All public funding here comes from the annual block grant given by Westminster. Recent Ministry of Defence figures show there to be 3,520 British Army personnel here, one for every 539 people here. People often recoil at the description of modern-day unionists as settlers due to their distance from the 17th century Plantation of Ulster, but these are people whose political project is entirely dedicated to maintaining the political hegemony that the plantation and, latterly, partition created, so I think it’s still a fair description. They are, at best, the political descendants of settlers.
There have been those such as Brendan O’Leary who support reunification that have tried to argue that the Good Friday Agreement and its provision for a border poll represents the end of colonial rule in Ireland, but this isn’t true. Under the Good Friday Agreement, the only person who can call a border poll in Ireland is the British Secretary of State. There are no defined criteria for them being compelled to do so. In the end, Ireland’s political future remains firmly in British hands.
LA: In May 2022, you wrote an excellent article for Ebb in response to Sinn Féin becoming the dominant political party in both the North and South of Ireland for the first time. A development that in some quarters was greeted jubilantly in what I swiftly realised upon reading your piece was based on simplistic or disingenuous analysis. In some ways, this book feels like a continuation of the arguments that you began to make in that essay. In the year that has passed since you wrote that article, has anything surprised you in what has transpired in the North politically, whether Sinn Féin's manoeuvrings or anything else?
OB: I wouldn’t say that anything has particularly surprised me because the road that Sinn Féin are travelling is one that is well-worn in both Irish and global history, and they were already quite far down that road by the time of that article. Things haven’t really moved much since that article was written, Sinn Féin are still in opposition in the South and imploring the DUP to return to government in the North but I will say that I was particularly disappointed to see the party leader Mary Lou McDonald saying that, were she to be Taoiseach after the next election, she would not attend commemorations for Provisional IRA volunteers following a manufactured controversy about the party’s MP John Finucane speaking at such a commemoration in Armagh recently.
While I would stress a lack of surprise, it just seemed to me to be despicable; these volunteers were the revolutionaries who fought and died for the achievement of a united Ireland and in doing so created the modern day Sinn Féin, and so for the leader of the party to just discard them and the families they left behind as she readies herself to really enter the halls of power only proves true once again the words of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, that you ‘have to do things according to their rules’ once you enter their system.
I also think that, for anyone who perhaps says to themselves that Sinn Féin will sell out their republican ideals but will deliver on the housing reform to tackle the housing crisis in the South, it shows an incredible weakness. All it took was one week of columnists confecting outrage and McDonald undercut one of her party colleagues and discarded the people whose blood built her party. That doesn’t exactly bode well for the idea that she will have the strength to tackle the private interests that have made Southern housing so unaffordable.
LA: The book is full of memorable lines and one that has stayed with me since I read it is the concept of the North of Ireland acting as a ‘call centre for Britain’ – some might scoff at such a comparison, but you demonstrate clearly why it is an apt one, could you summarise here why that’s the case?
OB: I think this would have immediately become the case after deindustrialisation had it not been for the Troubles, but the recent passage of the Protocol has made this a more attractive prospect than ever for private companies. Everything is cheaper in the North as compared to Britain: wages, rent for offices, housing, anything you can think of, it is cheaper for a multinational in Belfast. The Protocol just makes this process all the more certain in my view; for cheaper wages, cheaper rent, and the same corporation tax as they would pay in London, companies can now have unfettered access to both the British and European markets.
The peace process era has seen an uptick in literal call centres in the North but this isn’t just what I mean. The North also has plenty of universities and the younger generations are very well educated, but even those doing better paying jobs for companies like KPMG, Citi, and Accenture will still be structured on the call centre model, outsourced abroad to somewhere where the workforce speak English and it is cheaper to do business. The median wage in the North is £29,000 per annum and the median UK wage is £31,000, which the North contributes to, so take out the North’s weighing down of that UK median and you begin to understand just how much lower wages are here when compared to Britain. At the time that I was writing the book, house prices had risen by 50% from 2015 and they’ve only risen further since, but it is still much cheaper here than say London or Dublin. Unlike most places, the cities have the lower house prices in the North and so Belfast is ripe for the type of gentrification the inevitable influx of FDI will bring with it. It is still a small city without the infrastructure capable of taking on much new housing, and so they’ll still have Derry to ruin if they run out of space here.
LA: During a despicably sycophantic interview with Alastair Campbell in October 2019, the Labour MP John McDonnell stated that he hoped Tony Blair would be remembered for his achievements in Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement and ‘not for Iraq’. A particularly egregious example perhaps, but what would you say to those on the Left who extoll the Good Friday Agreement and the ‘peace process’? What has been their real impact for the people in the North?
OB: I would say that people should not mistake the absence of everyday violence for peace. What has been arrived at here has not been some noble all-together-now initiative to lift a war-torn area out of immiseration, it has been a concerted effort to bring the North into the neoliberal order that Britain and the rest of Ireland had been implementing throughout the period of the Troubles.
The impact of the ‘peace process’ in the political sense has been what Liam Ó Ruairc calls a ‘pacification process’ whereby the republican opposition to British involvement in Ireland, which used to encompass opposition to the economic policies that were central to that presence, has been watered down to the point where so-called republicans are chomping at the bit to enter the halls of power in Belfast as we speak so they can take the top spot in the institutions that administer British power here and continue to implement the disastrous economic policies that they have put in place, hand in hand with the British and the unionists, since 1998. What this process has meant is that, while the bombing and shooting has for the most part stopped, the lives of the people of the North haven’t improved by any measure, and, if anything, have gotten worse, certainly since 2008. Throughout the process, agreements have been drawn up to shore up the powersharing arrangement at Stormont – usually because Sinn Féin and the DUP have come to another inevitable impasse and these agreements, such as Fresh Start, have been used to bring the North further into the neoliberal modus operandi. This has been described by the economist Conor McCabe as a ‘double transition’, the transition to both peace and the en vogue neoliberal economics of the time. While, originally, there was a peace dividend whereby the Northern economy improved after the Agreement – it would have been difficult for it not to – the economic crash in 2008 finished that.
The public sector has been slashed and slashed again; local hospitals have been closed, waiting lists in healthcare are a seemingly-permanent scandal, social housing waiting lists continue to balloon, education targets and needs are missed annually. In the private sector, wages are lower than Britain or the South, disposable income is considerably lower, and employment has shifted from the manufacturing jobs of the 60s to transient, zero-hour call centre and service industry jobs. Economic inactivity, ill health, and suicide have all been at extraordinarily high levels since 1998. In 2016, it was reported that more people had died by suicide from 1999-2016 than had been killed in the Troubles. 18% of the North lives in poverty and our homelessness figures rise with each count. I don’t know how anyone could argue that this is a place experiencing anything akin to ‘peace’. In the 1960s, people organised into the civil rights marches and when they were violently repressed by the state, they organised into paramilitaries to fight the state. The idea of either of these things being possible at this moment in time is beyond remote.
On this topic, I would say nobody should be so naïve or show such little understanding of politics to say that Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, or anyone else involved in the Good Friday Agreement should be thanked for the cessation of violence here. The cessation of violence is thanks to the republican working class, who agreed to disarm. You can say that they were duped into doing so – and I do think that if you could show people in 1998 what 2023 would like that a lot of republicans would change their minds, maybe not about the cessation of 30 years of violence, but certainly about backing the forthcoming political settlement. But the republican working class still took that decision and it is upon that decision that the ‘peace process’ rests. It is not equivalent for loyalist working class paramilitaries, who were for the most part operating as intelligence assets for one form of British or RUC intelligence or another, and whose weaponry and operational ability was thus derived from government power. If John McDonnell or anyone else wants to credit someone for the ‘peace process’ and the cessation of violence, let it be the people most affected by that violence, the republican working class of places like Belfast, Derry, Armagh, and Newry.
LA: Your analysis of the ‘peace process’ in Ireland reminded me at times of the ‘peace process’ in Palestine, an indefinite and deliberately veiled means to continue colonial domination (and neo-liberal economic policies) under the spurious guise of achieving ‘peace’. With a small elite of the colonised population often benefitting in both cases. Are the parallels between Ireland and Palestine something that you think about?
OB: I am aware that this story sounds made up but I swear it’s true: I was in Palestine in 2018, walking through the old city of Nablus and our tour guide stopped and spoke in Arabic with a man who had been standing in his front garden, beneath an orange tree. Clearly, the man had been asking about us, because once he got his answer, he turned to us and said: ‘Irish will always be welcome here. Tiocfaidh ár lá.’ It turned out that he had lived in Belfast in the 90s. This is to say that despite some liberals hand wringing about Irish people ‘centring’ themselves by finding common cause with the Palestinians, it is impossible not to. The Palestinians themselves see it and I would suggest that those here who would presume to speak on their behalf should instead speak to a Palestinian.
In terms of our respective peace processes, there are certainly similarities in the aims. However, if we are to follow the Liam Ó Ruairc line of peace processes actually being pacification processes, then I think the one here has been much more successful than the one in Palestine. I think this is the case because the Zionist settler colonial project is still in expansion mode, as we see in the constant battles for new settlements in places like Sheikh Jarrah last year. This is not the case in Ireland, where, if anything, the colonial project has been contracting at least since partition was implemented. While the PLO is analogous to Sinn Féin in terms of their participation in the peace process and their incorporation into the colonial system that has displaced and brutalised their people, I think the difference is that there is still a significant resistance to that in Palestine. I don’t think anyone could look at the emergence of recent groups like the Lion’s Den or Jenin Brigades and say the Palestinian people have been pacified. I spoke of not mistaking a lack of violence for peace but every day we see reports of how the Palestinians aren’t afforded that lack of violence; I myself saw the IDF and their guns, the checkpoints, the Palestinian only roads. Their peace process has been a failure of pacification, ours has been a success – that’s the difference.
LA: I found your chapter on the cultural element especially fascinating and thought-provoking. Are the Irish language and traditional Irish sports important to you personally? What do you see their role as being within the broader political struggle?
OB: My mother tells two stories of me as an infant: that I was able to hit a sliotar with a hurl before I could stand, and that I would speak sentences that alternated between English and Irish, whichever language had the easier word to pronounce. Again, it is the luck of the family that I was born into but a huge portion of my life has been dedicated to the Irish sport hurling, our national game that is over 2,000 years old, and the Irish language. We were raised speaking Irish and playing hurling, there has never been a time when I did neither. I refer to myself as a native speaker, although I probably don’t meet the academic threshold for that, I figure that I am an Irishman who has spoken Irish as his first language for his entire life; what am I if not a native speaker? In terms of the sport, it has only been hurling that I have played and I come from Kilkenny, the stronghold of hurling in Ireland. There isn’t a day goes by where I don’t have my hurl in my hand and this is thanks to my father, who coached me and every other child in our parish for years upon years. There is a stereotype in places like Kilkenny of a ‘good hurling man’; my father is a good hurling man and in turn made good hurling men of me and my brothers.
As I read more, my appreciation for Irish culture like the language and hurling began to make more sense in my head. In the pre-Marx era, Friedrich Schiller wrote of form (reason and rational) and sense (physical sense) being combined to create a third sublime state of humanity, whereby mankind would be able to experience ‘complete intuition of his humanity’. Without something like Marx’s materialism to guide him, Schiller eventually lost faith in this idea, but he did recognise that labour was estranged from enjoyment. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx grounded these ideas in materialism, identified our alienation from our own labour, and recognised that we could only reach the Schiller’s exalted state – aesthetic freedom – through controlling our lives, our labour, and what our labour produces. I see Irish culture as being central to that for Irish people. Even if we were to get Britain out of Ireland tomorrow, I think the achievement of aesthetic freedom for Irish people is impossible using foreign modes such as the English language, soccer, or pop music. These are modes that we can never hope to control, but we can control our own games, language, and music. This is something that necessarily comes after a political and economic revolution but is central, in my opinion, to achieving the full vision of the Reconquest of Ireland as was espoused by people like James Connolly and Máirtín Ó Cadhain.
In the present day, I think of these struggles for things like language rights in the sense that Connolly did, as ‘the echo of the battle’ when the real battle is control of industry. This doesn’t, however, lessen the importance and battling for language rights can be a great avenue by which people understand their power to bend the state to their will. The problem with the current struggle for Irish language rights in the North, as discussed in the book, seems to me to be that the demands are less the bending of the state to the will of the people, and more the demand that the state open up, accommodate, and institutionalise the people.
LA: In addition to your own work, who or what else would you recommend people to read on this topic if they are keen to know more? And what to avoid perhaps also...
OB: The problem is that the people to read and to avoid are quite often the same people! Case in point being Henry McDonald. If you want to know what was happening in both republican and loyalist paramilitaries during the Troubles you have to read his books, but I would advise disregarding any of his analysis. It always puzzled me how a man could lay out, repeatedly, how deeply tied to the British intelligence state all loyalist paramilitaries were and then criticise republicans for not reckoning with loyalism as something separate from Britain. Brendan O’Leary is another in that camp; his three-volume history of the North that is cited repeatedly in my book is essential reading as a meticulous material overview of how the state came into being and how it functioned thereafter, but then his opinions are the most boring milquetoast liberal ones imaginable.
Former revolutionaries whose works are especially worth reading include Connolly – I myself use Shaun Harkin’s James Connolly Reader – Bobby Sands, Peadar O’Donnell, Pádraig Pearse, and Séamus Costello. Former revolutionaries still with us whose analysis remains sharp include Tommy McKearney and Anthony McIntyre. I don’t believe that anyone has ever written a better book on unionism than Geoffrey Bell’s The Protestants of Ulster. In terms of Troubles histories, you have Anne Cadwallader, Ed Moloney, Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Farrell, Gearóid Ó Faoileán, and Brian Hanley. Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh writes both good histories, usually local to his native Tyrone, and good analysis on his blog. For broader Irish history, FSL Lyons, TA Jackson, and C. Desmond Greaves. Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh: Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution by Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston has become a go-to since it came out too. When it comes to the fusion of culture, history, and the politics of their times, few were better than Ó Cadhain and Tomás Mac Síomóin. An eventual goal of mine is to translate Ó Cadhain political works around both republicanism and the language question into English for a new audience.
Of course, I would recommend basically every work cited in my own book – other than the Alastair Campbell and Frank Kitson ones.
LA: Thanks again for writing such an excellent and informative book. I learnt a lot from reading it. Is there anything else you would like to add?
OB: I am aware that there are people who may roll their eyes at my citation of Mark Fisher, but I believe that the quote of his I included in the book is one that bears repeating: ‘A culture which takes place only in museums is already exhausted. A culture of commemoration is a cemetery.’ That was my mission statement for the writing of this book. I feel as if republicanism has been allowed to wither on the vine in Ireland all while Sinn Féin has become the biggest political party in the country. Theirs is a movement with too much momentum for it to stop, but I want to help spark something else, a return to a politics that is not alien to the people of Belfast, a return to self-organisation and self-reliance. The best way to commemorate our dead is to take their ideas, modernise them for the present day, and implement them.
LA: What a brilliant line and sentiment for us to end on. Thanks again, Odrán.