Arbour Hill, 10th May 2026
Speech delivered by comrade Fionn Wallace at the 2026 Connolly Commemoration
Friends, comrades, we gather here today at the final resting place of 14 leaders of the 1916 Rising for the Communist Party of Ireland’s annual commemoration marking the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, among them perhaps the greatest Irish anti-imperialist, James Connolly.
We are witnessing a raising of consciousness as Western imperialism puts its excessive brutality and genocidal violence on show for all to see. The challenge now is to move from mobilisation to organisation. In order to build a revolutionary movement we must have solid revolutionary theory. As communists, anti-imperialists and internationalists we must work to understand the changes taking shape and use that understanding to help shape a future free from profit shifting, resource theft and unequal exchange. A future where sovereign development can flourish, nations can breathe and trade without the weight of diplomatic coercion, illegal sanctions, impossible debt repayments and structural adjustment programmes imposed by the imperial core, their global financial institutions, and the use or threat of military force.
We are going through a tumultuous and perilous time in world history. A time of war and genocide, global warming, great power competition and mounting global instability. It is difficult not to draw comparisons with Connolly’s time and the wider context of the Easter Rising – the brutal, industrial scale slaughter of the First World War. A war of rival imperialist and colonial European powers jostling for global dominance.
As Lenin explained, the imperialist powers in his time had divided the world among themselves with the only possibility of redrawing their colonies being through strength and strength was only able to be tested through war. War was inevitable sooner or later.
Today we see the US-led imperialist order in crisis, and in order to attempt to maintain its dwindling hegemony and its neocolonial arrangements it is prepared to bring the entire world down into chaos with it. There is much talk of the rise of China and others and the formation of a new multipolar order. None of this is a foregone conclusion, all that we can be sure of is a long period of increased instability and war as the US lashes out in ever more brutal fashion.
The Western-dominated imperialist world system is demolishing the conditions of possibility for human life. It is extracting value from human beings and nature at such a level of social murder that it is pushing humanity to an absolute breaking point. It is this system of extraction, plunder, pollution and early death that the US and its allies seek to maintain and advance.
Of course the excesses of imperialism are being met with pushback. We see popular resistance forces in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and the broader West Asian region dealing historic blows to imperialist aggressors and their encroachment on the region. These anti-imperialist forces should be supported while staying cognisant that Western imperialism has shown us again and again that even if the resistance holds firm and prevails, destruction, destabilisation, de-development, death and demoralisation also serve the interests of the aggressors.
The Monroe doctrine has been revived and the US has made it clear that it intends to assert domination over Latin America, to control this sphere of interest in preparation for intensified conflict with China and its allies, who they identify as the central threat to American primacy.
All across the West we see record-breaking weapons spending and war preparation while public services are gutted and people are mined for rent by transnational investment funds.
Western capitalist states have nothing to offer the masses. They are not only militarising in order to subjugate the global South, they are arming against and repressing their own people. People who now face permanent austerity and cuts that finance militarisation and wars that feed oppression, instability, and deprivation at home and abroad. Meanwhile Western elites finance far-right and fascist forces in order to redirect social discontent into political projects that shore up the imperialist order that is killing us all.
We must be mindful that these are not the actions of forces operating from a position of strength.
The US, NATO, and the Zionist Entity, the Axis of Genocide, are clear in their purpose. Destabilise, subjugate and destroy sovereignty-seeking projects all around the world. Palestine, Yemen, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, the Alliance of Sahel States and many others are targeted with information, economic or kinetic warfare. It’s tempting to believe it’s because these states are evil or imperialist or authoritarian because we’re inundated by such relentless propaganda but no!
It’s only because they pose a challenge to the white supremacist, imperialist, western-led capitalist order. If we cannot be clear about our common enemy and our definition of imperialism then our analysis will reproduce the power structure we claim to oppose.
The media and our political class scramble to shift the narrative to accommodate aggression against sovereignty seeking projects. We must make the connections between these struggles and our own. Essential to this is understanding where Ireland is situated in this configuration of forces.
Successive Fianna Fail and Fine Gael-led governments in Leinster House have looked out at the world, at the rising inequality, affordability and housing crises, the climate crisis, ecological destruction and famines, the endless imperialist wars and genocide, and they have thought to themselves, “what can we do to help make this worse?”
That is the ungenerous interpretation of the material record but it holds some truth. An alternative reading is that for the longest time our political class has not had the ability nor the will to exercise economic or political sovereignty. Instead it takes direction from Washington, London, and Brussels.
For crumbs from the table, they sell out their own country to a transatlantic elite class that has no loyalty to any people or nation but only to the expansion of Western capital.
We live in upside down land. The government says Ireland is a democracy, but we take orders from a genocidal mafia state across the Atlantic. The Occupied Territories bill, which passed second stage with a majority on the floor of the Dáil, with support from Fianna Fail, has been killed because of threats from the US.
Where there is no sovereignty there is no democracy.
They talk about human rights while our central bank facilitates the bankrolling of a genocide and our profit shifting regime is a central node in the theft of desperately needed trillions from the Global South each year.
The government says we are militarily neutral, while our airspace and territory are used by the US and NATO to ferry troops and weapons to and from genocidal imperialist wars.
Meanwhile, the government has orchestrated that Ireland become a data centre sacrifice zone.
Where our water and energy resources are gobbled up by polluting boondoggle monstrosities that are so deeply integrated into the military industrial complex AI targeting of Gazans being genocided was happening in giant black boxes dotted all over the country.
The Irish political class talk endlessly about the threats posed to Ireland by faraway countries with no interest in us and then sign defence agreements with Britain, a country that is still occupying nearly a fifth of Ireland. A government who openly talks about Irish reunification as a security threat to their military interests.
Our constitution says we adhere to the peaceful resolution of conflicts but the government just handed over half a billion euros to pay the pitiful wages of forcefully conscripted Ukrainians.
The 90 billion just handed to Ukraine by the EU is conditional on more bodies being thrown to the gruesome frontlines. EU leaders are clear that the war must be kept going for at least 4 more years while the ReArm Europe programme is completed and the Union is ready to fight Russia directly.
While this madness transpires we are subjected to a constant slew of jingoistic slop from pro war politicians, pundits, academics, lobbyists and think tanks about how Ireland must get with the programme, tool up and stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends in the Axis of Genocide.
And this is the maddest thing. These last few years, the US, our traditional trade partner and geostrategic ally, has openly been fueling genocide and war like there is no tomorrow. NATO powers are all gearing up for war as some massive showdown between the US and China and the EU and Russia seems increasingly inevitable.
The government frets about instability but is actively trying to undo the only piece of legislation that protects us from getting embroiled in this mess. You look at the state of the world and the raw power and destruction being unleashed by our so-called like-minded partners and you think “if only there was some ready made mechanism that protects us and stops us being pulled into a world war on the side of the genocidaires?” And yes! we have that, it’s called the triple lock, but now, at this perilous conjuncture in history is the time our great leaders have decided they have to destroy it.
They want to destroy a policy that is at the heart of Irish neutrality and not only goes back to legislation we have had since 1960, but to the life and work of James Connolly and before him Wolfe Tone and others. There is a reason poll after poll for decades shows 4 out of 5 people supporting Irish neutrality. We know in our bones that the likes of Connolly and many before and after him were fighting for independence from powers that went around starting wars to create more colonies, more subjugated peoples, more death and profit at the end of a gun.
Yet here we are, our leaders buying weapons from those same powers and paying the wages of soldiers fighting imperialist wars while they lie to us about their plans to send our sons and daughters off to kill people who are still inspired by OUR revolutionary heroes.
And all war is awful, Connolly was crystal clear on this. Writing shortly before the rising he said “We do not believe that war is glorious, inspiring, or regenerating. We believe it to be hateful, damnable, and damning. And the present war upon Germany we believe to be a hell-inspired outrage. Any person, whether English, German, or Irish, who sings the praises of war is, in our opinion, a blithering idiot.
But when a nation has been robbed it should strike back to recover her lost property. Ireland has been robbed of her freedom, and to recover it should strike swiftly and relentlessly… But do not let us have any more maudlin trash about the “glories of war”, or the “regenerative influence of war”, or “the sacred mission of the soldier”, or the “fertilising of all earth with the heroic blood of our children”. etc. etc. We are sick of it, the world is sick of it.”
Yes, we are sick of their wars, these wars rob everyone. Capitalism and imperialism are robbing us of our freedom and our future.
The contradictions have reached a tipping point. Our lives and the future of life on earth now depend on our ability to organise and fight imperialism and this world destroying capitalist system. We must win the fight to preserve Irish neutrality and end Ireland’s complicity in imperialism North and South. We must complete the unfinished revolution.
Thank you comrades.
