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

People Before Profit is one of a minority of political parties in the Dáil that have elected representatives in the North and the South. We have representatives in the Northern Ireland Assembly and in councils in the North. The reason is that we believe in ending partition and uniting this island, not because we are bleary eyed nationalists but because we are internationalists and oppose partition in the tradition of James Connolly. James Connolly understood how one developed a tradition of a shared island and why partition was about dividing people and setting them against each other, which would lead, as he correctly predicted, to a carnival of reaction with green and orange at each other's throat. He argued, and it is as relevant today as it was he first made the argument, that one must unite working people on the things they have in common to break the shackles of partition and empire.

What does that mean today? I will give two concrete examples. We will never convince people in the North to be part of a united Ireland unless we have a national health service. We must move immediately to a national health service, not back to the two-tier system as the Government is doing currently. Why on earth would people in the North join a dysfunctional two-tier health system? They will not do it, so we must move immediately to a national health service. Second, we must immediately separate church and State. Why on earth would people in the North join a state where 90% of the schools are controlled by the Roman Catholic Church? There is no chance they will do it. We still tolerate a situation where the Religious Sisters of Charity are closing down nursing homes on the Merrion Road because, for some reason, a religious organisation controls nursing homes and can close them down even though they are funded by the State. Why on earth would people join a state that allows that to happen?

These are the things we must do if we want to share the island and convince people that overcoming historical divisions is in their interest. That is how we will do it. People in the North are angry about the state of their health service. They would like to fight for a new and better National Health Service where people get access to healthcare on the basis of their need, not on the size of their wallets or the austerity that has been imposed on the service. They would also like to be in an education system in which everybody is treated equally. We could share that education system and have integration of our children. If we lead the way in progressive, radical change such as that, in the tradition of James Connolly, we will become an attractive option for the idea of ending partition and uniting this island.

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