A Bobby Sands statue in Twinbrook in west Belfast is “going nowhere, not now and not ever”, Sinn Féin Assembly member Danny Baker has said, as republicans across Ireland marked the 45th anniversary of the hunger striker’s death with large and determined commemorations.
The statement comes in the wake of a political controversy at Belfast City Council, where unionist parties, supported by Alliance, pushed through a motion to reconsider the presence of the memorial – erected last year in the Republican Memorial Garden without planning permission. A Sinn Féin amendment calling for equal scrutiny of all similar structures was rejected, while the SDLP abstained, a move that led to the resignation of one of its own councillors, who acknowledged the statue’s deep significance.
Despite these manoeuvres, the message from Twinbrook was unequivocal. Addressing a crowd gathered in Bobby Sands’ home community, Mr Baker said the attempt to challenge the memorial would fail just as previous efforts to suppress the republican struggle had failed.
“The spirit of the prisoners and our communities can never be broken,” he said.
“Our opponents were shook to their core last year and will continue to be because we are on a path, a path to Irish unity, based on equality and rights.
“There’s one very simple message I was asked to give today: the statue is going nowhere, not now and not ever.”
His colleague Pat Sheehan reinforced that position, describing Sands as “an icon and legend for freedom-loving people throughout the world” and condemning what he called ongoing efforts to distort or diminish his legacy.
Drawing a direct line between past and present, Sheehan compared current unionist opposition to the policies of Margaret Thatcher during the hunger strikes, stating that attempts to criminalise or erase Sands had failed then and would fail again.
“When all of us here today are gone, Bobby Sands will still be remembered,” he said. “He and his comrades will remain a beacon of light for freedom-loving people everywhere.”
The Twinbrook commemoration formed part of a series of events across the country.
In Dublin, activists and supporters of the Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association (IRPWA) gathered at Kilmainham Jail, paying tribute to Óglach Bobby Sands and reaffirming their support for republican prisoners.
Speakers emphasised that the issues at the heart of the hunger strike remain unresolved. IRPWA activist Brian Kenna told those assembled that “decades on from the Hunger Strikes, men and women remain incarcerated as a direct result of their involvement in the ongoing struggle for Irish liberation.”
He called for renewed determination, stating that the current generation “owe it to Bobby Sands” to continue the struggle.
Elsewhere in Dublin, the 1916 Societies, alongside Éirígí, held a vigil at O’Connell Bridge, joining republicans in remembering the courage and conviction shown by Sands and his comrades in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh.
Their commemoration placed particular emphasis on Sands’ writings, which continue to inspire. His words – written under the harshest conditions – were recalled as a testament to the unbreakable will of those who resisted British policy in Ireland.
And in Twinbrook, where that legacy is most keenly felt, the message was unmistakable – neither political pressure nor administrative challenge will remove the memory, or the monument, of Bobby Sands.
A white line picket organised by the IRPWA drew a strong turnout, with local people lining the road in a visible show of solidarity. An oration delivered at the statue highlighted Sands not only as a hunger striker, but as a community activist rooted in the life of his area.
IRPWA Belfast activist Séamus Fitzsimons underscored the continuity of the struggle, linking the sacrifice of the hunger strikers to the situation of present-day republican prisoners.
“Let us be clear about what Bobby and the ten (hunger strikers) died for, and what they did not die for,” he told those gathered.
“They did not die so that former Republicans could take their seats in Stormont and administer British rule. They did not die so that the struggle could be packaged up, sold off, and called a peace.
“Bobby Sands and the ten brave men did not give their lives so that former Republicans could usher in a capitalist united Ireland.
“That is not the Republic they died for. And it is not the Republic we will ever accept.”
Leonard Cohen’s haunting rendition of Irish rebel song, “Kevin Barry”
Iconic Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen gave a memorable rendition of the famous Irish rebel song in 1972.
May 03, 2026
Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016 Getty
Iconic Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen gave a haunting rendition of the Irish rebel classic “Kevin Barry” during a concert in 1972.
Cohen introduced the song by speaking of the horrors of war and how it claimed the lives of men under the age of 20.
“It’s not that I wish to burden you here with another war, another care, but there are struggles in different places, and they all amount to the same thing – men of 18 and 19 getting killed,” Cohen told the audience.
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He then delivered a memorable rendition of the famous song, which describes 18-year-old Kevin Barry’s walk to the gallows at Mountjoy Jail in November 1920.
Barry’s execution was immortalized in song shortly after his death when an unknown Irish author penned the famous lyrics.
The song describes Barry’s final moments as British soldiers try to turn him into an informant hours before he faces the hangman.
It has become a staple Irish rebel tune and has been covered by a wide variety of Ireland’s most celebrated artists, from the Dubliners to the Wolfe Tones and from the Clancy Brothers to Christy Moore.
Cohen’s version is decidedly different from the traditional Irish versions, but the Canadian singer’s effort is still captivating.
Although he had no ancestral links to Ireland, Cohen developed a close bond with the country before his death in 2016.
Cohen played 12 shows in Dublin, Belfast, and Sligo between 2008 and 2013, and also performed a number of shows at the National Stadium in Dublin during the 1970s and 1980s.
The singer opened the European leg of his 1972 tour in the National Stadium and told the audience that he’d “waited all his life to sing in Ireland”.
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.’
Christian symbols and beliefs are increasing being treated with a contempt that would be unthinkable if directed elsewhere
Two Israeli soldiers were sentenced to 30 days in jail after one used a sledgehammer to smash a statue of the crucifixion in southern Lebanon
May 01, 2026 at 10:18am BST
THERE is something both shocking and strangely familiar about recent images from southern Lebanon: an Israeli soldier, sledgehammer in hand, smashing a crucifix and striking the figure of Christ.
It invites outrage, and rightly so. Not simply because it targets a sacred image, but because it echoes – however faintly – the humiliation the image represents.
The crucifix is not decorative. It is the sign of a man publicly stripped, mocked, and killed. To desecrate it is, in a sense, to repeat the act.
In a very different register, recent weeks have also seen the circulation of AI-generated images of Donald Trump depicted as Christ the healer – images that, while not violent, draw on the same readiness to appropriate what is sacred without any clear sense of its meaning or limits.
The two are not equivalent. But they are not unrelated. If one is physical desecration, the other points to a cultural one – less visible, but no less telling.
It is in that light that the incident in Lebanon should be seen. Condemnation has been swift in some quarters. Yet, writing in The Spectator, Melanie McDonagh points to something more unsettling: such incidents rarely stand alone.
Her account of harassment of clergy, obstruction of worship, and hostility in and around the Holy Land suggests something less accidental and more ambient. Not systemic in a formal sense, perhaps, but certainly not isolated.
Even so, perspective matters. As grotesque as the smashed crucifix is, it remains an attack on an image – symbolic violence set against a world in which the desecration of human life has become almost routine.
The 2025 Religious Freedom in the World report by respected charity Aid to the Church in Need found that around 5.4 billion people – nearly two-thirds of the world’s population – live in countries where religious freedom is seriously violated. The figure applies across all faiths, but Christians remain among the most widely affected.
Other datasets, including those cited in UK parliamentary briefings, estimate that several thousand Christians are killed each year for faith-related reasons, with over 4,400 deaths recorded in 2024, alongside thousands of attacks on churches and Christian communities.
Churches destroyed, clergy abducted, women targeted, entire populations displaced: this is not exaggeration but fact. The smashed crucifix must be set alongside these realities—not to diminish it, but to see it clearly.
And yet, to leave it there would be to miss something important.
What makes such incidents troubling is not only their offensiveness, but what they reveal: a growing permission, in certain contexts, to treat Christian symbols – and Christian belief – with a contempt that would be unthinkable if directed elsewhere.
What makes such incidents troubling is not only their offensiveness, but what they reveal: a growing permission, in certain contexts, to treat Christian symbols – and Christian belief – with a contempt that would be unthinkable if directed elsewhere
That was illustrated clearly in Belgium. A popular breakfast programme on the national broadcaster VRT aired a ‘Blue Monday’ sketch in which presenters smashed statues of Jesus and Mary for comic effect. The broadcaster later apologised, acknowledging it had “misjudged” the segment.
What proved more revealing came afterwards, when Irish journalist Colm Flynn – well known across both religious and mainstream media – pressed those involved on their reasoning. Why was it acceptable to treat Christian imagery in this way? Would the same be done with Jewish or Muslim sacred objects?
The response faltered. There were appeals to humour, context, and Christianity’s majority status. But when the comparison was pressed, the hesitation was unmistakable. What they would not do to Jewish or Muslim symbols, they felt free to do with Christian ones.
That, in turn, rests on a familiar premise: that Christianity is treated less as a living faith than as a cultural inheritance – something to draw on, reinterpret, or disregard.
The crucifix becomes not a sign of devotion, but a prop. Once that shift takes hold, a licence follows.
That licence is visible closer to home. A recent report by a Vienna-based research and advocacy group monitoring discrimination against Christians in Europe recorded over 2,400 anti-Christian hate incidents in a single year, including vandalism, arson, and physical assault. The United Kingdom features consistently among the countries where such incidents are documented.
Survey data also suggests that more than half of Christians in some studies report hostility or ridicule in public or professional life, with younger Christians particularly likely to self-censor.
This is not persecution in the sense experienced in parts of Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. No serious observer would claim equivalence. But neither is it negligible. It represents a different register of the same reality: a narrowing of the space in which Christian belief can be expressed without penalty, distortion, or dismissal.
The danger lies in normalisation.
When a crucifix is smashed in Lebanon, it is recognised – at least by some – as an outrage. When Christian belief is marginalised or caricatured in Western public life, it is more likely to be framed as progress, or as the cost of pluralism. The language differs, but the underlying dynamic is not unrelated.
In both cases, there is a failure to recognise what is at stake as something that carries meaning for real people – something that deserves, at the very least, respect.
None of this requires a defensive posture. Christianity is not fragile. The figure on the cross is not diminished by the blows of a hammer, nor by the derision of a culture uneasy with its inheritance. If anything, the crucifix already anticipates such responses: a God who enters into humiliation rather than evading it.
But theological resilience should not be mistaken for cultural indifference. A society comfortable with disparaging one tradition while carefully insulating others from offence is not neutral. It is making a judgment – one that deserves to be named.
The more difficult task is to hold together two truths. The desecration of symbols matters, because symbols mediate meaning, memory, and identity. To attack them is, in a small but real way, to wound the communities for whom they carry weight.
But the desecration of human life matters more. Infinitely more. Any discussion of religious offence that loses sight of that hierarchy risks distortion.
The temptation is to choose between these truths: to fixate on symbolic slights, or to dismiss them in the face of greater horrors. The more honest position is to refuse that choice: to say the smashing of a crucifix is wrong while recognising that it is a sign, not the substance, of a deeper disorder.
A disorder in which reverence itself is becoming harder to sustain – seen not only in acts of vandalism or careless satire, but in the growing ease with which what is sacred is drawn into cultural or political projects and reshaped to fit them.
The recent images of Donald Trump depicted as Christ the healer belong to that same pattern: many were rightly appalled, yet others defended them, revealing how readily the language and imagery of faith can be pressed into service for ends far removed from its own claims.
And that, perhaps, is where the desecration of Christian imagery in Lebanon, Belgium, Britain – and, in a different register, the United States – intersect. Not in a single narrative of persecution, but in a shared erosion of the instinct to treat what others hold sacred with care.
It is a small instinct, easily dismissed – but once lost, not easily regained.
:: Fr Dominic McGrattan is a priest in the Down and Connor diocese and Chaplain at Queen’s University Belfast
A chara, I hope you and yours are well. After a tireless campaign for truth and justice spanning nearly 54 years, the victims and survivors of the Springhill-Westrock Massacre of 9th July 1972 heard what they knew all along – their loved ones were innocent and unjustifiably killed.It has been Paper Trail’s honour to support their campaign with legacy archive research over the years. In turn (because of new evidence we discovered), this has helped other families impacted by violence around that period too. With family support yesterday, we published our own investigation into the 1st Battalion King’s Regiment. 🎥 Watch: Killer Kings and its Bloody Tour of West Belfast in 1972
Rather than a couple of out-of-control loose cannons within a section of C Company 1 Kings over a couple of hours, Paper Trail investigated a number of similar murders and cover-ups across all the Companies and over the 4-month tour of duty. Hopefully, these killings will be re-investigated in new inquests as promised, but – taken together – I believe they show a pattern of lawlessness and impunity, rather than an isolated loss of control. Hence why we call them the Killer Kings. The legal teams have been made aware of this, of course, and we will support the families in the coming years. Don’t forget you can subscribe for free to our YouTube channel, Paper Trail Pro. Kind regards,Ciarán
