Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the radical demands of the democratic programme remind us, the Irish revolution was not just a guerrilla struggle of a minority to change the colour of the flag, it was a massive social upheaval of men, women, working people, the poor and the downtrodden to demand an end to deprivation and poverty to secure the right to housing for children, to share out the wealth of the nation in a fair way and to subordinate the rights of property to the needs of the people.

This morning on the street in Dún Laoghaire, I met a woman who is a medical doctor who, along with her sick husband and her child, has been in emergency accommodation for the past two years. She should be working in our hospitals, helping to alleviate the waiting lists and the trolley crisis instead of suffering that plight along with thousands of children, many thousands of other men and women and hundreds of thousands who cannot afford their own home or extortionate rents.

The modern inheritors of the Irish revolution and the democratic programme are not primarily the people in this room. They are the people who took to the streets to fight water charges, the people power movement that achieved marriage equality and repealed the eighth amendment and the people who have been on the streets in recent weeks demanding the right to housing and to end the scourge of homelessness. They are the nurses who will be on the picket lines, on strike, demanding fair pay and equality for mostly women workers in order to address the desperate, deplorable, shameful crisis in our health service. If we want to honour the revolutionary tradition and the ideals of the Democratic Programme, we must end the scourge of homelessness and the housing crisis, we must give rights to working people, we must share the wealth in our society, we must end the shame of the trolley crisis and people waiting on hospital lists for weeks and months for desperately needed operations. That should be our tribute to the Irish revolutionary tradition.

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