A bit bemused at how quickly this has all gone. But then one looks at the polling on Starmer and how he is so profoundly unpopular and the sense that it cannot be changed. He seems to get that too:
The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election.
I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace.
Every decision I’ve taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour party.
I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s desire to change the Triple Lock, and no longer require UN approval before sending more than 12 troops abroad, is facing a backbench pushback.
The Fianna Fáil parliamentary party will discuss the issue this week after several of its TDs signed a letter which argues that the new policy needs to be considered as “a matter of urgency.”
The letter adds; “This is in view of the fact that this constitutes a fundamental change in traditional Fianna Fáil policy as enunciated in successive ard-fheiseanna, policy manifestos, public statements.”
The letter contends that the policy of requiring UN Security Council approval for overseas Defence Force missions “… was also a central factor in enabling the Government to persuade the Irish people to support the Nice and Lisbon referendums.”
It is understood the letter has been signed by deputies Pat the Cope Gallagher, Willie O’Dea, James O’Connor, Padraig O’Sullivan, John Lahart, Albert Dolan and others.
As RTÉ notes, FF has a small degree of cover, but only a small degree, from the Programme for government and that point re the traditional Fianna Fáil policy carries considerable weight.
The Programme for Government, ‘Securing Ireland’s Future’, gives a commitment to review the Triple Lock.
It states: “We will continue to engage with international partners and we will reform the Triple Lock legislation whilst also ensuring that amendments to the legislation are in keeping with our values and policy of active military neutrality.”
Can this reach a critical mass sufficient to stymie the Government’s plans?
Many thanks to the person who scanned and forwarded this document to the Archive.
As noted previously O’Donnell, born in 1893 and died in 1986, was one of the pivotal radical figures in Irish history, a republican, socialist and writer who later edited The Bell publication along with Sean Ó Faoláin.
This document examines some of his thoughts, issued by the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum. As this site notes:
The Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum was established in early 2013. The Forum was the result of a number of meetings and seminars organised over the course of 2012.
In early 2012 the Communist Party of Ireland hosted a seminar in Dublin entitled “21st-century republicanism: What does it mean?” There were four speakers, coming from the broad republican family and reflecting a range of opinions. There was standing room only at the meeting, which clearly reflected the mood that something needed to be done to draw these forces together in the face of the massive onslaught against our people and the deep economic crisis of the system. Following from that event there was general agreement that the CPI should continue this process of drawing like-minded republicans together. In consultation with a number of individuals it was the feeling that a certain number of important areas needed to be explored and developed. The areas that most felt had been either underdeveloped or ignored were particularly those relating to (1) the nature of the state, (2) the role of class in society, and (3) the complex nature of imperialism’s rule in Ireland, North and South.
The Forum has a Statement of Principles which includes the following:
We cannot conceive of a free Ireland with a subject working class, we cannot conceive of a free working class in a subject Ireland
The aim of the Forum is to promote the ideas of socialist republicanism, as best expressed by Connolly, Mellows and O’ Donnell, which hold that the people of Ireland should own and control the country and its resources, politically, socially, and economically in advancing the cause of undoing the conquest of Ireland and building a socialist republic.
The document itself outlines some of O’Donnell’s thought and notes:
One hundred years on, the 1922 Counter-Revolution and the wholesale slaughter of Revolutionary Republics of the time, have been remembered with horror and even bitterness, the length and breadth of Ireland.
It argues that a middle-class leadership betrayed the working class Republicans during the War of Independence leading to the Civil War and then continues by asking
What does all that say about Revolutionary Socialist Republican tactic and analysis for the way forward?
It argues, quoting Connolly:
We cannot join the ruling class and think they will ever allow us to build a Socialist Republic.
And that victory:
…will only happen with our own learning, organising and agitating for real change.
Bad actors were quick to exploit these potential flashpoints. Shortly post 8am the day after the Brexit vote, Morning Ireland got Sinn Féin’s late deputy first minister Martin McGuinness on the line.
He declared that Britain now had “no democratic mandate to represent” Northern Ireland, and that it was a “democratic imperative for a border poll to be held”.
This kneejerk reaction dominated the Irish narrative for years. It was taken as read that Brexit was going to change everything in the North. In reality, there was no border poll, and there is still little prospect of one.
For all the hysteria, the long-term effect of Brexit on attitudes to reunification in Northern Ireland has proved to be negligible.
Like the rest of the householders who were willing to pay water charges, I’ve tried being a responsible citizen. More fool us. Grandstanding irresponsibility certainly paid off for the parties of the left on this one, and you can thank Paul Murphy & Co if your taps run dry this summer.
In November 2014, Murphy led an anti-water-charge mob that surrounded a car holding tánaiste Joan Burton and an aide in Jobstown for over two hours. They were later acquitted of the ludicrous charge of false imprisonment, with the taxpayer funding Murphy’s defence through free legal aid, despite his TD’s salary of almost €90,000 at the time.
However, the facts of the incident are not in dispute. Video footage showed Murphy with a loudhailer, asking the crowd: “Will we let her go or hold on to her for the night?”
Whatever about criminal consequences, the political response to that incident should have been swift and decisive. The Government had a brief window of opportunity to declare that such tactics could never be tolerated in a civilised democracy. Ministers would have had the backing of the vast majority of the population in pressing ahead with the charges as a broader rejection of thuggery in political discourse.
So when Simon Harris promised his “blueprint for a unified Ireland” last weekend, the reaction from Fianna Fáilers was pretty much the same as anytime they hear him: “What the f**k is he up to now?”
Fianna Fáilers assumed this was some effort to give Fine Gael an edge over them at the next election. There was lively chatter on the Fianna Fáil Whatsapps, with some abuse directed at Fine Gael and the usual finger-pointing at Micheál Martin, in this instance for insufficient interest in a united Ireland.
But I find any political edge for Fine Gael hard to see here. Sure there are voters who believe that achieving a united Ireland should be a top priority. It’s just there aren’t very many of them, and none of them is going to vote for Fine Gael anyway.
And what is the logical conclusion of this self-help generation? Brace for a neologism: looksmaxxing. This is the practice of optimising every aspect of your physical appearance. Traditional ideas such as maintaining a good diet, a light skincare regime, basic exercise three times a week? No, in the looksmaxxing “era”, that outlook is positively arcane. These “looksmaxxers” (I feel as stupid writing it as you must feel reading it) are breaking jaws in pursuit of the perfect profile, lengthening their bones with skeletal surgery (not joking!) and enjoying healthy dinners of amphetamines.
There is a solution if having to write this genuinely is a problem.
What it purported to be was an account of the disappearance of a number of scientists, a link with the space programme, or rather a secret space programme and a video tape which when decoded was meant to show the first landing on Mars by a joint Soviet/American team in the early to mid-1960s which…
Well, I’ll stop there and let you discover for yourself.
It comes in various parts, which you must judge for yourself whether they are worth viewing. In truth it’s as interesting for the insight into documentary techniques of the period as it is for its content. Ropey title sequence? Check. Stilted interviews? Check. Avuncular older man as presenter? Check. Alcoholic former US astronaut eaten up by a secret too large to be able to contain? er… check.
Thing is that this was actually the final programme of a genuine series of science documentaries, Science Report, which Anglia Television had axed. The producers decided to go out on a spoof. And not only but also the theme music and incidental music was supplied by Brian Eno.
There’s an accompanying novel, which was pretty silly, but notable in the way it fed into what would later be UFO mythology of animal experimentation. And the programme itself, obviously, can be regarded as a forerunner of all the Moon hoax nonsense or perhaps a sub-genre of covert space programmes and collusion between Soviets and the US. Actually the more I think about it the more it strikes me that this is a perfect encapsulation of future concerns, from ecological disaster to conspiracy theories and so on.
Ambrose’s fiction escaped its British origins to take up residence in the strange dreamscape of American conspiracy theory. As the political scientist Michael Barkun traces in A Culture of Conspiracy, the show’s notion that the elite was plotting to abandon Earth keyed into existing visions of imminent apocalypse. Evangelical Christians’ belief in the Rapture, for example – when the chosen few, supposedly, will vanish, leaving everyone else to their fate.
Alternative 3’s afterlife really took off in 1991, when the conspiracist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The book’s paranoid tales of secret government evil, “evidenced” by fictions like Alternative 3, influenced not just paid-up conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, but everything from the UFO-obsessed, nothing-is-as-it-seems world of The X-Filesto an array of hip-hop stars. On Nas’s 2008 track Testify, for instance, he name-checks “William Cooper, who told you the pale horse is the future”.
Cooper fused Alternative 3 with theories about Aids, depopulation and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a real series. Another influential theorist, Jim Keith, wrote Casebook on Alternative 3, complete with a chapter on “Missing Scientists”. The book begins by acknowledging the story appears to be a hoax. But what if that claim is just an elite trick? Meanwhile, other conspiracists were worrying about who would get to go to Mars: just how senior a Freemason did you need to be? Ambrose himself was visited out of the blue by a young man. “He said he’d come all the way from California,” the writer recalls, “and he just really needed it to come to the horse’s mouth. He seemed perfectly sane, perfectly nice. We chatted. I said, ‘No, I’m terribly sorry. I did make the whole thing up.’ And he was very crestfallen.”
How does he feel about the fact his 50-year-old conceit still has some people convinced today? “Frankly: ‘Wow, it really worked!’ A classic of its kind.” The question of what people are willing to believe, he considers, is itself “something worth establishing as a theme”. He cites an old saying: “it’s easier to fool someone than to persuade them they’ve been fooled.”
And because in 2026 when so much of what was fun and good from the past has to be repurposed to stuff that is vicious and useless and fear-mongering, what do we see?
Over the past few months, a strange story has been seeping into the mainstream media from the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube. Its claim: scientists whose work related to aerospace and nuclear research are either dying or going missing. According to an influential report in the Daily Mail in March, the disappearances form a “chilling pattern”: two, for instance, had worked together at an air force laboratory. The implications, in some accounts, are Hollywood sinister, with scientists working on top-secret breakthroughs running into dark forces who wanted to get hold of what they knew – or ensure their silence. And it all seems to have something to do with what we used to call UFOs.
On examination, these claims collapse. The “scientists” actually worked in disparate fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Several were actually administrators. Two had retired. One died of natural causes; another in a shooting spree. In any case, as the debunker Mick West pointed out, the “US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce” is around 700,000, so normal mortality rates would predict far more deaths over the 22 months concerned – about 4,000. Nonetheless, Congresspeople have been warning darkly of threats to “national security”. The Trump administration has launched an investigation into a phenomenon that is often said to go hand-in-hand with something called “Alternative 3” – whose origins might end up surprising Trump and co.
Anyhow, because it was fun and good and remains so, here’s a link to it on YouTube, not sure how long it will last there, but the last few minutes are particularly excellent.
*Fun fact, the presenter became a Tory MP, his daughter is a Liberal Democrat peer. Fuel for a conspiracy theory? Jesus Christ – no, no it’s not.
Apologies to anyone who follows the CLR on Bluesky, we only realised recently, thanks to Tomboktu, that it wasn’t working and hadn’t been for a month or two. There’s some setting at either the WordPress end or Bluesky’s side that seems to stop after a period of time.
Anyhow, it’s a sign perhaps that many of us aren’t hugely invested in that side of social media, but that’s just us! Many are and no harm getting the word out. If people do notice that the site isn’t being updated on Bluesky, tell us in comments and we’ll do our best to get it up and running again as quickly as possible.
One dynamic that is very noticeable this last month or so is the number of politicians in Ireland on the centre left or left who have quit TPFKAX in favour of Bluesky or other platforms.
Mentioned last week, the passing of David Hockney. He was a genuine character and an artist of considerable genius. This is a painting of his I’m particularly fond of. Nice of the Tate to provide an insight into it but as with the best art it speaks for itself. Though I like his honesty in the following quote:
When you photograph a splash, you’re freezing a moment and it becomes something else. I realise that a splash could never be seen this way in real life, it happens too quickly. And I was amused by this, so I painted it in a very, very slow way.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
