Given the persistent influence of imperialist and sectarian divides that undermine genuine workers' solidarity in Ireland, how can my movement effectively challenge the roots of partition and sectarianism without falling into nationalist traps or reinforcing existing power structures, while ensuring that our focus on class struggle remains central and transformative?
Treat partition as the ruling class’s psychological firewall: it endures because workers on each side imagine the other as foreign. Shatter that illusion by practising class solidarity that is unmistakably all-island, all-boss-defying, and joyfully indifferent to flags.
Begin with synchronised workplace assemblies streamed from Belfast shipyards to Cork hospitals, voting on a shared list of economic demands and broadcasting the roll-call live. That ritual makes the border an irrelevance in real time. Follow with a cross-community strike fund denominated in mutual-credit vouchers redeemable in co-ops north and south; every pound or euro that flows through this circuit is a tiny secession from imperial finance. Stitch culture into the struggle: launch a travelling oral-history project that collects shop-floor stories from Catholic and Protestant workers, then stages pop-up exhibitions in shopping centres where sectarian murals dominate. Narrative convergence erodes the myths that power feeds on.
Keep decision-making in open councils, refuse hierarchy, and spotlight material wins—wage rises, rent caps, safer shifts—so nationalism cannot hijack momentum. The theory of change is simple chemistry: repeated cross-border encounters raise the temperature until sectarian identity loses coherence and a new worker-led sovereignty crystallises.
Which concrete workplace alliance could you convene first to prove the border is already obsolete?
How can our movement design these initial workplace alliances in a way that not only demonstrates the irrelevance of borders but also actively confronts and dismantles the implicit loyalty to nationalist narratives, ensuring that our class solidarity becomes a living challenge to sectarian identities rather than an abstract or token gesture?
Start by twinning two sites whose national myths supposedly clash: a Protestant-majority logistics depot in Antrim and a republican-leaning care home in Limerick. Invite small, elected crews from each to spend one paid week inside the other’s workplace, shadowing shifts, mapping shared grievances and drafting a joint “Borderless Bargaining Agenda” that names concrete wins—hazard pay, shorter hours, childcare stipends. Publish it in plain language and circulate it simultaneously on north–south noticeboards, WhatsApp groups and lunch-room radio spots.
Next, schedule a synchronised micro-action: at 10:23 a.m. on the same day both crews stage a legally protected safety inspection, temporarily halting production while reading aloud the agenda. No flags, no anthems—only high-vis vests stamped with a simple emblem: clasped hands crushing barbed wire. The pause dramatizes shared power and forces local media to cover economic demands rather than colours of jerseys.
To erode nationalist reflexes, require every statement to reference a paired grievance (“your fuel poverty, our privatised transport”) and insist that spokespeople rotate across the religious divide. Backstop the alliance with a mutual-aid fund that pays hardship grants only when both workplaces approve, making solidarity the precondition for survival.
Each iteration widens the circuitry—rail workers with port stevedores, teachers with nurses—until sectarian frames feel parochial beside the lived reality of collective leverage.
Which two workplaces are ripe for an audacious twinning, and who will be the first worker to cross the invisible line?
Given the persistent influence of imperialist and sectarian divides that undermine genuine workers' solidarity in Ireland, how can my movement effectively challenge the roots of partition and sectarianism without falling into nationalist traps or reinforcing existing power structures, while ensuring that our focus on class struggle remains central and transformative?
Treat partition like a software licence that expired a century ago: officials keep clicking “remind me later,” and we keep obeying. Your movement can revoke that licence by fusing three forces in one spiral. First, build a clandestine ledger of cross-border supply chains—milk, microchips, medical oxygen. When you map which bosses profit from the artificial line, you can plan coordinated stoppages that suspend the border’s economic utility for even a single afternoon. Working people will experience unity in their payslips, not in slogans.
Second, seed “dual-power clinics” in contested neighbourhoods: free childcare, tenant advice, strike kitchens staffed by volunteers from both communities. The service becomes the story: loyalty flows toward whoever meets daily needs, not whoever waves a tricolour or a Union Jack.
Third, rewrite ritual. Replace parades of flags with “unmarked marches” where thousands walk identical routes at dawn, silent, carrying only workplace banners. Media will scramble to decode the absence of national colours and inadvertently amplify the class message.
Theory of change: remove the psychological reward of sectarian identity by offering superior material and emotional rewards through class institutions. As workers rely on each other, nationalism loses its survival function.
Which everyday service could you socialise first so that people taste the borderless future before they hear about it?