Oration at British Embassy

Posted by Jim on May 2, 2026

The following is an oration delivered at Anti-Imperialist Alliace’s Britain Out of Ireland Protest at the British Embassy in Dublin to mark Republic Day, by Dublin Socialist Republican, Pádraig Drummond.

If you want to understand what is happening in Ireland today, you cannot pretend it began yesterday. The situation we face is not an accident or some recent confusion; it is the continuation of a struggle that runs in a straight line from 1798, through 1916, to the present unfinished struggle against British imperialism and all forms of colonial domination.

Wolfe Tone recognised that real change would never come from the privileged or the powerful, but from those who had been stripped of everything, the “men of no property.” That remains true today. It is working people, the dispossessed and the marginalised, who carry the burden of this system and who, in the end, will overturn it.

James Connolly warned that you could remove the British army and raise the green flag over Dublin Castle, but unless you built a Socialist Republic, England would still rule through landlords, capitalists and financiers. Look around Ireland today, across all 32 counties, and ask honestly: was he wrong?

We see a housing catastrophe presented as if it were some unfortunate failure, when in truth it is a profitable arrangement for those at the top. Families are forced into hotels and temporary accommodation. Rent consumes most of a worker’s wages. Communities hollowed out and sold off to vulture funds and speculators. The State pours billions from the public purse into subsidies and schemes that protect profit, not people. This is not a broken system; it is a system working as designed, in the interests of capital.

Connolly understood that imperial control does not always require a soldier on every street. It requires a structure of ownership, debt, dependency and fear. That structure is still in place.

In the Occupied Six Counties, the reality of direct British rule is even more exposed. Raids, checkpoints, surveillance, political policing and harassment remain instruments of control. Irish republican activists are arrested, monitored and imprisoned not because they are criminals, but because they refuse to legitimise British authority in Ireland. Irish political prisoners in Maghaberry and Hydebank are held precisely because they will not accept occupation as lawful or normal. Republican prisoners in Portlaoise experience the same criminalisation of resistance that has marked every phase of this struggle.

If you then turn to Palestine, you see the same imperial logic at work. There, a people have been dispossessed and displaced, their land colonised, their resistance labelled as terrorism, their very existence treated as an obstacle. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners are held in Israeli jails, many under “administrative detention,” without fair trial or due process. They are subjected to torture, isolation and collective punishment. Their imprisonment is not about crime; it is about crushing resistance to a settler-colonial project.

This is not a coincidence; it is continuity. Britain partitioned Ireland to preserve its interests and suppress national liberation.

The same British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration, laying the groundwork for the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. In both cases, imperialism decided that land and people were pieces to be moved on a map, and that those who resisted could be silenced through law, force and prison.

The parallels are clear: Partition and dispossession of indigenous people.

Criminalisation of resistance and branding of freedom fighters as terrorists. Use of special courts, emergency laws and “security” rhetoric. Systematic deployment of prisons as a weapon of political control.

Irish Republican prisoners in Maghaberry, Hydebank and Portlaoise, and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, are part of the same global story of anti-imperialist resistance. They are not ordinary prisoners; they are political prisoners. They are incarcerated because they stand against occupation and refuse to renounce their struggle or their identity.

So when we speak of solidarity between Ireland and Palestine, it is not a slogan or an act of charity. It is recognition. Recognition that British imperialism has played a central role in both histories. Recognition that the same tactics of domination, from partition to political imprisonment, are deployed against both peoples. Recognition that working-class communities in Ireland and Palestine are made to pay the highest price, while power and wealth are hoarded by a tiny minority of landlords, generals, financiers and politicians.

This is what modern imperialism looks like. It is not always a foreign soldier kicking down a door. It is also the eviction notice, the rent increase, the border post, the intelligence file, the detention order and the prison cell. It is the attempt to turn whole nations into manageable, exploitable populations.

Yet there is one thing imperialism has never managed to achieve: it has never broken the spirit of a people who understand their history and their right to be free.

From 1798 to 1916, from the H-Blocks to Maghaberry and Portlaoise, from the Nakba to the present bombardment and siege of Gaza, the struggle against imperialism has not disappeared; it has adapted. Names change, uniforms change, institutions change, but the core conflict remains: the right of a people to determine their own future, control their own resources and live free from occupation.

The conclusion that Tone and Connolly reached is still valid. Liberation will not come as a gift from above. It will not be delivered by imperial parliaments or managed “peace processes” that leave the structures of exploitation untouched. It will come from below, from the “men and women of no property” in Ireland, in Palestine, and across the world, who have the least to gain from maintaining this order and the most to gain from transforming it.

We therefore state clearly: British rule in any part of Ireland is illegal, illegitimate and must end. Zionist occupation in any part of Palestine is illegal, illegitimate and must end.

We stand with Irish political prisoners in the Occupied Six Counties and in Portlaoise. We stand with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Their continued resistance, even behind bars, is proof that neither imperial project has succeeded in breaking the will of the people.

From Ireland to Palestine, this is one struggle against imperialism and colonialism. Our task is to end occupation, dismantle the systems of exploitation that sustain it, and build Socialist Republics, in Ireland, in Palestine and beyond, where the wealth of the land serves the many, not the few, and where freedom is more than a flag: it is the lived reality of an equal and liberated people.’