Speaking today party member Donal O’ Ceallaigh laid out the position of the Communist Party Of Ireland.
Comrades and friends,
People may ask, why are we, as citizens of a Republic, holding this protest to coincide with the coronation of Charles The Third as King of the United Kingdom and Head of the Commonwealth. Especially, as our political leaders and their fawning media agents have told us, the new King will speak some Irish at his coronation, as a sign of his respect for the Irish.
The very fact that he will use a few Irish words in his coronation is at the heart of why we protest. He will speak a few Irish words, not out of respect for Ireland or our language, no, he will speak Irish because the coronation will assert his and the British state’s control over the 6 counties. His ancestor, Elizabeth The First, also learned a few phrases in Irish as a means of completing the conquest. His coronation is the embodiment of the denial of the right of the Irish people to a united, Independent Republic.
We are here under the banner of “We Serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland.” That was the motto of the Irish Citizen Army and it proclaimed the neutrality of Ireland against all Imperialist powers. However, the rehabilitation of the British Monarchy in Ireland goes hand in hand with the attempts to bring the 26 counties into a military alliance with Britain, the US and the EU as a member of NATO. During the 1st World War the political representatives of the Irish capitalist class, Green and Orange, urged tens of thousands of men to their death in the service of British imperialism.
The history of the English, then British crown, is not some kind of Disney fairytale that we all live happily ever after in. It is a history of invasion, conquest, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, war, famine, cultural genocide, the extraction of resources and profit, the supply of cheap labour and cannon fodder for British capitalism. But we are not supposed to dwell on that. No, our ruling class wants us to be “mature”. After all, the past is past and the British monarchy wasn’t that bad. After all, they civilised us, they taught us English and democracy and best of all, allowed our native capitalist class to share in the exploitation of the Irish working class.
The truth is that our ruling class are running scared from our history of struggle against the Crown. They fear the risen people, they know that it is their alliance with imperialism, US, UK and EU that maintains their dominant position in Ireland. That’s why they bow and scrape before Biden and now Charles the Third. The Irish people do not bow to any King and any politician who does so cannot be called republican or socialist.
To finish I will quote James Connolly and this is what he wrote 121 years ago on the Coronation of Edward the Seventh.
“We are Socialist Republicans; we work for the realisation of that time when kings and emperors will be no more, when they will be remembered by mankind as the strong man awakened remembers the hideous nightmare which oppressed him as he slept. As Socialist Republicans we desire the application to society in all its relations, industrial and political, of the freest republican principles. We unceasingly devote our energies to awakening in the minds of the workers consciousness of the sufficiency of their own manhood and of the dignity of their class; and we hope and believe in the rapid approach of that time when those ideas and that consciousness will have so far leavened the minds of the workers as to justify us in calling upon them to rally up for that final struggle, the issue of which will assuredly usher in the era of free and enfranchised labour, instead of the barbaric splendour of military and financial castes.
Meanwhile, animated by such hopes, inspired by such principles, looking forward impatiently to that time of glorious struggle, when the eyes of the world are turned upon that City of London, when Capital and its cringing slaves are united in adoration of the monarch who has been successful in uniting in his person, all the baser attributes of the mediaeval monarch and the modern stock-jobbing capitalist; we also in imagination hasten thither in order to offer to King Edward, in the name of ourselves and our class, the only homage we owe him – OUR HATRED.
