Introduction

Gan Owain Ab Owain

At the end of January 2025, members of Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru travelled to Ireland to undertake political education and to represent the party at the Bloody Sunday March for Justice in Derry. While the primary aim of the trip was to show solidarity with our comrades in struggle in Ireland and to pay respect to those who had been murdered by the British army in 1972, it was also recognised that the level of political education on the Irish situation is very low in Britain. Despite the recent war in Ireland and the ongoing British occupation of the six north-eastern-most counties of Ireland, the majority of people on this side of the Irish sea couldn’t tell you a great deal about the Irish situation or the British state’s role in it. Those that would offer information would likely either parrot British propaganda, or more rarely espouse the comprador¹ Sinn Féin position about the success of the peace process and reunification not being far away. Both of these retellings would be misinformed and would assist with the continued occupation of Ulster and exploitation of the Irish working class.

The actual situation is far removed from any convenient soundbite you may hear from a government minister or a Sinn Féin party staffer. Occupation remains, the peace process has cemented the sectarian divide and we are no closer to a United Ireland than we were in 1968. Those who led the revolutionary movement have either taken comfortable jobs running the colony on behalf of the British – or if they refused to sell out have been left to languish and die in poverty or have been imprisoned for continued revolutionary activism. The army, police and Unionist paramilitaries – all on the state payroll – continue to stalk the streets of the north, enforcing British rule by violent force. A draconian system of laws keeps any upstart republicans in check with the threat of juryless courts and conviction by association. Our delegation saw first hand the scars of colonialism, the fortresses of the occupation and the effects that a continued British presence is having on communities there.

As one of our comrades noted “it is one thing to understand that a country is occupied – it’s entirely another to see it in person”.  Over the next few weeks we will be publishing the accounts of Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru’s delegation as ‘Dispatches from Occupied Ireland’. They detail thoughts and experiences of our delegation, how it has influenced their understanding of the Irish situation, and their deepened understanding of the nature of the Union and colonialism. Through this series we hope to make the situation in occupied Ireland much clearer. To illustrate that the war in the north of Ireland was not an intractable sectarian bloodletting but a defeated war of liberation. To demonstrate the lived realities of the six counties and how the Good Friday Agreement does not provide for the possibility of the establishment of a 32 County Socialist Republic. Ultimately, establish that the injustices associated with British occupation of Ireland are ongoing and will continue until the republic of 1916 is fully realised – and why therefore it is of the greatest importance for communists and socialist-republicans on this island to support the struggle for a free and united Ireland by whatever means the Irish people see fit.

1. A comprador is a member of the colonised nation who collaborates and assists the occupying colonial forces. Sinn Féin form the government of the occupied northeast of Ireland and therefore govern the colony on behalf of the British. They sit on the board of the militarised, sectarian police force – The PSNI. They manage the justice system that disproportionately prosecute republicans and convicts people through juryless courts. Sinn Féin have become the colonial administrators of “Northern Ireland”. ↩︎