Róisín McAleer.
When people who care about issues say things like, “this isn’t about politics, it’s about doing the right thing,” it’s hard not to flinch.
In Ireland, we’ve been told about the right thing for centuries. The plantations were civilising. The famine was to do with market forces. Partition was pragmatic. The British army was sent to protect Catholic communities. Internment was security. The Good Friday Agreement was an end to violence. Empire always says it’s acting out of necessity and morality, never out of power and profit.
There is no such thing as something “not about politics.” Politics is whether your da had steady work. Politics is whether your ma could afford to buy you a new communion dress, or one from St Vincent de Paul’s.
Politics is about the price of butter. Politics is about putting out your bins. Politics is about getting an appointment with a doctor. Politics is about whether your rent or mortgage payment swallows half your pay packet. Politics is who owns the land, the banks, the ports, the universities, the data centres, and the gas off Corrib, and the energy grid.
When activists in particular say their work “isn’t political,” they’re forgetting our own Irish history, and asking others to too. NGO spokespeople and academics do this a lot. Even the “good ones”. They inadvertently ask us to believe that military alliances, sanctions, and strategic manoeuvres are moral reflexes rather than calculated moves in a world system dominated by Zionist finance capital and monopoly power.
But people who have not lost sight of their working-class identity in Ireland know what empire sounds like, when it clears its throat.
Imperialism isn’t about bad leaders making poor moral choices. It is a structural stage of capitalism. When capital accumulates at home, it must expand abroad. It seeks markets, resources, labour, and strategic control. And when it does, it never says “we’re securing supply chains” or “we’re defending corporate interests.” It says “we’re defending our freedom.”
And while the Dublin government and its EU warmongering buddies of the willing find endless funds for militarisation and strategic positioning, we’re told there’s no money for public housing, no resources for the crumbling health service, no alternative to cuts to community and public services. Shannon can be used as a stopover for Zionist military aircraft, but families will have to wait years for homes, and weeks, months and years for hospital care and surgery.
As Irish workers, our instinct should be scepticism when NATO friendly EU countries speak the language of moral urgency. Because that morality is always selective. There is outrage in some cases, silence in others and the pattern follows strategic interest, not human need.
The real “right thing” is international solidarity with ordinary people not alignment with rival blocs of Zionist controlled capital. It is opposing our own ruling class when it ties our country to EU-NATO imperial projects. It is refusing to let Irish labour, Irish land, our natural resources and infrastructure, and Irish legitimacy be used to prop up US-EU domination abroad.
And here’s the warning, particularly to the liberal, self-identified left who repeat “this isn’t political.”
When you say that, you are also actively disarming the Irish working class.
You strip away analysis and replace it with your sentiment. You reduce structural questions of empire, capital, and power to individual moral impulses. You make it easier for comprador governments to move without scrutiny and harder for workers to see the material interests at stake.
There is nothing progressive about pretending politics disappears when the language becomes humanitarian. That is precisely how imperialism modernises itself.
If you consider yourself left-wing, then you must accept that everything touching genocide, war, sanctions, alliances, and state power is political, and that refusing to analyse it through class is, however unintentionally, accommodation.
Because once you accept the idea that empire can act “outside politics,” you’ve already conceded the ground on which working-class solidarity stands, and on which a working-class anti-imperialist movement can be built.
When local pro-neutrality councillors also say, “this isn’t about politics, it’s about doing the right thing,” what they’re really doing is politics with the language scrubbed clean of class, power, and history. And we see this play out right here in Ireland.
Local councillors debating whether to defend Ireland’s neutrality, specifically the government’s plan to abolish the Triple Lock on sending Irish troops abroad, have framed their work as something above politics: “not about politics, but about doing what’s right for the country and its people.” [1]
That claim should be a red flag for anyone committed to working-class politics.
Because there is no escaping politics in a class society. Politics is not a game politicians play behind closed doors; it’s the struggle over who controls resources, power, and the conditions of ordinary people’s lives.
For working-class communities in Ireland, the renters pushed to the edges of Dublin, Belfast Cork, and Galway by rising rents, the workers on precarious job contracts, the young people leaving because there’s no affordable housing, these things matter precisely because they are political. What happens to Irish foreign policy, to neutrality, to defence spending, to whether Shannon Airport handles military traffic, all shapes the economic and social environment here at home. Policies that shift Ireland closer to EU militarisation or strategic alignment with NATO powers won’t just happen “above” politics. They will impact public spending priorities, tax allocations, and work conditions across the country.
The attempt to declare an issue “beyond politics” is an old trick of the ruling class. They strip away class analysis so you’ll see only moral sentiment, a vague sense of “doing good” and not the material forces behind it.
Empires have always spoken in that language, from British rule here to modern strategic alliances across the EU and NATO-aligned blocs.
Dear experts on the “left”,
Imperialism is not accidentally violent or accidentally exploitative; it is a stage of capitalism where monopoly capital must expand beyond borders for markets, resources, and strategic advantage. Neutrality, alliances, war-making, these are all entangled in class interests. When local councillors say something “isn’t about politics,” they are stripping it of the very context that reveals whose interests are at stake.
To friends and comrades in neutrality groups across the country: take heed.
Pretending politics disappears when the language becomes humanitarian or moral doesn’t elevate our struggle. It DEFANGS it. It diverts the working class from seeing how Zionist dominated imperialism, state interests, and capital accumulation shape our lives. It convinces people to rely on feelings rather than analysis, to chase moral purity instead of class solidarity.
[1]Local authorities won't follow party line on the triple lock