The standoff on the Garvaghy Road today is usually filed as a leftover from the 1990s. It is more useful than that. It shows, in real time, how group identity and a sense of whose place it is actually work. Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin vice president and Stormont First Minister, stood on the Garvaghy Road this morning with Mary Lou McDonald and residents blocking the Orange parade. They were not performing abstract liberalism. They were acting as a community that regards the road as theirs and the parade as an intrusion. Some in the crowd called for Stormont to be brought down. In that setting Sinn Féin is saying that sharing space on the other side’s terms does not work, that residents must consent to what comes into their area, and that resistance is legitimate. None of this excuses the Orange Order. It could take another route, through areas where it would face no conflict at all. That is not the goal. The goal is space: the expansion into it and the occupation of it. Both sides on that road are acting on the same premise, that territory belongs to a people. That matters because it is the easiest available test of the official story about diversity. Two groups that look alike and share large amounts of ancestry still cannot agree who may walk a particular road on a Sunday. The state has to bring in a specialist commission, large numbers of police, emergency court hearings and the head of the power sharing government. Ulster has had contact, time and shared institutions in abundance, and the lowest cultural distance between its two main populations. If proximity and institutions dissolved group conflict, it should have happened here. Some will say 28 years without a march on this road proves the institutions worked. It proves the opposite. That peace was kept by holding the two communities apart on this question, not by closing the difference between them. The first time the arrangement was tested, thousands were back on the road to say no. Now apply the same rule in the Republic. When residents anywhere across the State object to an IPAS centre placed in their community without consultation, the same party tells them their consent is irrelevant and their objection is bigotry. Residents’ consent is sacred in Portadown and dismissed everywhere else. The alignment on the ground makes the point a little sharper. Loyalist areas have flown Israeli flags since 2002, and unionist politicians speak openly of a longstanding affinity with Israel, seeing in it a people besieged by terrorism, as they see themselves. Republican areas fly the Palestinian flag, and Sinn Féin casts both the Garvaghy residents and the Palestinians as native communities resisting settlers imposed on them. Every one of those positions rests on the same premise: that a people has a prior claim to its own place and may refuse what is imposed on it. Sinn Féin accepts that premise in Portadown and in Gaza. It rejects it only in the Free State. People Before Profit and the rest of the left will call you a fascist for saying the obvious next sentence: if two closely related communities still produce recurring standoffs over, importing tens of thousands of people with larger differences in language, religion, family structure and historical memory into already dense working class areas will not produce harmony for your children and grandchildren. It will produce the same kind of dispute, only with a wider gap and less time to close it. That same left does not even hold to Irish independence. The Socialist Party, People Before Profit’s partner in their Dáil alliance, states in its own constitution a preference for a socialist Ireland within a voluntary socialist federation of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. The people who call you a fascist for defending the nation would bind it back to Britain, provided the flag were red.

Figures from Fingal County Council show that in January 2026 there were 450 single adults in homeless emergency accommodation under this Council. 171 were Irish citizens. That is 38% of those whose nationality was recorded, 61.2% were citizens of other countries, and 45.6% of the total were from outside the EEA. There were 354 families. 79 were Irish. That is 22.3%. Of those whose nationality was recorded, 77.6% were citizens of other countries, and 48.6% of the total were from outside the EEA. In both cases Irish citizens are a minority in a publicly funded service.