Show Notes
Our people have always known the importance of right relationship with the land. That's why we revere the Goddess Éiriu, who represents the vital union between Sovereignty and Fertility and the embodiment of prosperity and abundance. It's why we respect the fairies - na daoine maithe - and their place in the unseen ecosystem. Our fortunes, good and bad, were once well understood to be tied to our treatment of - and relationship with - nature. To this day you'll be hard-pressed to find an Irish person who would mess with a fairy fort!🧚♀️🌳 ☠️ We can view the way our people celebrated the coming and going of seasons as an intelligent way of ensuring the collective was living according to the natural metabolism of the season. These intelligent practices were forms of social technologies, ensuring harmony between people and the ecosystem that supported them. Under waves of colonisation, Ireland gradually lost sovereignty and, with it, a lot of the memory of these practices. The separation caused by land clearances (to make way for cattle) led to a decline in fertility as the stewards of the land were evicted. Soil exhaustion caused multiple famines and was a direct result of unnatural, brutal and extractive colonial economics. The partition treaty of 1921 didn't restore land sovereignty to the people. The colour of the flag flying in Dublin changed, but exploitative economic systems didn't. We need to pick up the abandoned demands of some of our greatest revolutionary figures, such as James Connolly - who inspired the title of this podcast. "For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth." It's time for real sovereignty, which belongs to the people and not "enterprise." With the urgency of the times we find ourselves in, where we could argue that WW3 has already begun, it has never been as important to be able to sustain ourselves. Ireland currently does not have food sovereignty. We are almost totally reliant on imports to feed us. This is manufactured precarity. One disaster and we could face crisis. Does this sound familiar? The true wealth of the people begins and ends with sovereign, fertile soil - not absentee landlords and investors. It's difficult to believe we could still be duped to believe the latter. Resistance, like colonialism itself, has come in waves. The truest forms of working class led resistance have always been tied to the land - whether through demands like the end of landlordism or the reclamation of the earth itself, as Connolly so elequently put it. Attempts to reclaim true Irish sovereignty can therefore be understood through what Marx called Eco-Fenianism. Have you ever heard of a more badass term than that? 🔥 Credit to Dr Eamonn Slater and his paper Irish Metabolic Rifts - Marx and Engels on Ireland for the analysis that inspired this conversation. You can view the paper here: https://irishmetabolicrifts.com/
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