Marie Sherlock TD – Larkin Commemoration Speech

Family of the late Jim Larkin, my trade union comrades and Labour party friends, I am very glad to be here to speak at the commemoration of the Jim Larkin, a pioneering Trade Unionist, Socialist and Internationalist.

We are here to honour his courage and tremendous leadership to the workers of Dublin in whom he inspired to fight for a better, fairer world inspired. It is also crucial on this occasion that we mark the enormous contribution of the other great Larkin, Delia, to the workers in this city.

The world is transforming before our eyes. These changes were building throughout 2025 but over the past four weeks, the world has literally changed.

Here in Ireland, we may not yet feel it or see it, but make no mistake, we are at a dramatic crossroads in the history of the West. And there will be consequences for Ireland.

Trump has unleashed a fascist imperialist project which is upending 80 years of an economic and global legal order.

The power of technological advancement and powerlessness of nation states has been exposed by the recent experience of Grok.

The artificial intelligence horse has bolted, nation states are gasping to catch up and the prospective impacts on all our lives is very real.

And with all of this, Europe drifts towards a worrying militarism.

The great battles for workers’ rights, climate justice and improved living standards are been abandoned in the preparation for war.

So too is climate action, the fate of the Palestinian people and the man made famine conditions that prevail in Sudan and Yemen and other countries across the world.

New climate records continue to be made and the torturous genocide in Palestine is now largely going unchecked.

They are being relegated to the background in this theatre of horror.

To borrow from Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci  - ‘the old is dying and the new has not yet been born’

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Geographically, politically and socially Ireland is now caught in the crosshairs of this transformation.

For decades, our country has been able to take the best of our relationship with both Boston and Brussels. We could ride both horses-import jobs, generate tax revenue from US FDI and  access the EU’s single market. Those in power in this country replaced decades of cultural clerical deference to the Church with a deference to the American chamber of commerce.

And it worked! For a chunk of people in this country in terms of high incomes, the freedom to travel, work and learn across the EU and the largesse granted by the public finances.

But all of this is changing.

Last week, Mark Carney powerfully described the "weaponisation of interdependence" and warned against integration as a source of subordination. Ireland is already there.

It used to be the case, for many years now, that Ireland sold almost as much into the US as we did into the EU.  It looks like that changed in 2025. The data is eye watering- the value of US exports rocketed. We are now more reliant on good exports to the US than we have been for a long time.  

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So the integration is very real and we are frighteningly exposed. This culture of subordination to the US has been plain to see for many years. Government’s dithering on Trump’s board of peace, the failure to press ahead with the Occupied Territories Bill, are just to name a few.

The biggest danger for Ireland is that integration as a source of subordination becomes a threat to our sovereignty.

Like any proud nationalist and internationalist, I am very proud of our political sovereignty.

But our economic sovereignty and economic independence has, for almost forty years, been at the mercy of the international capital markets and we all know how that cruelly worked out back in 2010. 

We are now at the moment where both economic and political sovereignty are being threatened.

Not by any state actor, but the emergence of artificial intelligence.

I believe that scale of threat to be greater than we have ever seen before.

Artificial intelligence can and will be an incredible force for good across so many facets of our lives. Chillingly, it can also be horrendous source of harm.  And I think many of us winced in recent weeks when our Government was literally reduced to asking Grok to stop.

But beyond the lack of regulation, there is an even bigger issue at stake here- control of AI systems are in the hands of so few. And this new techno feudal order, is a profound risk, not only to our own sovereignty, but right across Europe.

The next and most enduring challenge of our time is the ownership, deployment and abuse of AI systems.

Approximately 80% of EU digital services are imported from the US. In the words of Arthur Mensch, founder of tech giant Mistral “the biggest risk in the coming years for Europe is that we become a colony in AI”.

So many facets of our lives now rely on technology. Our risk is that it can simply be turned off-at a whim.

Integration and interdependency are the new tools of war and we are hooked on technologies controlled by the few.

We’ve already seen the far reaching consequences of this:

On our social media platforms, where disinformation is propelled by algorithmically controlled recommender systems.

And in our workplaces where AI systems are being used to recruit, manage and remunerate. No longer is the workplace balance of power between worker and employer- there is a third in the room; faceless and unaccountable.

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All of this adds up to a heady mix; a breeding ground for the far right. Preying on the growing disenchantment with deepening inequality and a weakening of the nation state.

Ireland and Europe now face a crunch moment.

So we know our weaknesses, and as democratic socialists, we are not going to wallow in the vulnerabilities of our country.

Instead, we must convert the symptoms of our weakness into a show of strength.  

Right now we have the healthiest public finances in Europe, driven in part by corporate tax revenues. This won’t last forever, but we have the ability to do things that will have a profound impact on the lives of workers and families in this country. Investment in our health system, in our homes to make them more energy efficient, in our transport systems to take private transport off the road – investment to make us more resilient, to ensure in the event of a downturn that we can better weather the storm.

We have a stark triple challenge in Ireland, in climate, housing and care.

Next month, marks 10 years of FF and FG in Government and I know many of us are asking what do they have to show for it. The healthiest public finances in Europe and the "paradox of plenty” is very real.

With record spending ongoing, for us the key challenge is this-

It’s not what you spend, but how you spend it.

In housing, billions are being handed over to developers to deliver turnkey homes, when the State could do it itself at a significant discount.

While the State directly built just 335 homes last year, it spent over €2 billion purchasing  4752 units from the private market.

 

The Department of PER itself admits that these purchases come with a 21% premium,  compared with direct build.

Not only was this a massive transfer from Government to developers.

It squeezes out potential homebuyers desperate to purchase a home, recall these homes were originally intended for the open market.

And it sees those workers, those families beggared by grossly high rents. Rents that have risen by nearly 30% in the last five years.

In Climate action, households are the second largest source of emissions in this country. Residential heating emissions are rising, not falling, growing by 5.6% last year. And the Government response to date, has been to throw millions in grants in the hope that some households will take them up.

Offering part grants to households for costly works in the middle of a cost of living crisis is not a strategy; it is a hope. It means that clean cheap energy is for the comfortable, not the many.

 

Climate action is a collective problem. So it makes no sense to me that we would reply on individual responses. We need a State led response- street by street retrofitting- economies of scale in terms of the skills needed, the ground covered and the price.

 

And in Care. Our health system is at breaking point. In 2024, we saw over 141,000 bed days lost in acute hospitals because patients had nowhere to go, no step-down beds, no community care. The government’s response? Adding a net total of just 134 beds in a year when we need to be building 1,000 per year. We are spending millions on "emergency" measures while penny-pinching on the permanent infrastructure that would actually free up our wards. It makes no sense.

All this paints a picture of a government happy to spend what it has, but with no real eye to what it is getting for it.

And it could be so different.

• Inserting decent working conditions and a new ‘cast iron’ collective bargaining clause into our €20bn public procurement budget to ensure good jobs and decent wages.
• Enabling flexible working rights so that we transform the working week to cut the costs of commuter congestion, open the door for the disabled, lone parents and others locked out of the labour force and most crucially enable workers to hold down their full-time jobs.

 

• And on migration, we need to create more, much needed, decently paid, paths into our labour market for workers from abroad. The State is spending nearly €1bn per year on privately run direct provision centres, funnelling thousands desperate for a new life through an international protection system that is not fit for purpose, when instead we should have a serious increase in the number of migrant employment paths into Ireland and ensure that those who need our protection are afforded it in an dignified and timely manner.

Our country needs migrants, like Larkin himself, we welcome them and we sure as hell will not resolve the issues of our country without them.

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The far right’s radical conservatism project is reshaping so much of our world. It is even infecting our politics here with the shameful comments by the Tanaiste on migration.

Larkin would have understood, the actions in the US are not the chaotic acts of a narcissist clown.

No Larkin would have understood it for what it is – these acts bear all the hallmarks of a systematically sophisticated fascist strategy designed to intimidate and cower all opposition at home and abroad.

Its objective is to drive a transition to a post democratic authoritarian world.

A paradigm where dictators ruling in the interests of ultra-right-wing techno feudal billionaires. 

And terrifyingly, these trends are not too far from home, Farage in the UK, Le Pen in France, the neo- nazi AFD in Germany and Vox in Spain.

The echoes of the 1930’s are becoming louder.

And it is not an exaggeration to say that every modicum of democratic progress since the French Revolution is potentially at risk.

Including the future of the planet and the natural world itself. 

In face of this growing tyranny, we have seen the craven imagery of leaders of the democratic world queuing to genuflect Trump; best shown by the shameful EU-US trade deal last summer.

History teaches the folly of appeasing tyranny - Bullies must be stood up to!

Larkin would have utterly rejected the pernicious philosophy of Fascism which divides worker against worker on the basis of repugnant racism, the colour of one’s skin or the accident of birth.

Throughout his life’s work in Liverpool, Belfast, Dublin and across the USA he repeatedly and relentlessly condemned the absurdity of the exploited attacking those who are even worse off than themselves to the advantage of rack renting landlords and blood sucking capitalists. Instead he emphasised the incredible potential of unity among working people.

This is our great challenge of today.

I want to conclude by saying, we must not allow ourselves to be daunted or demoralised, because there is always cause for hope and there is every reason to be confident.

The USA is a country with no tradition of autocracy. Indeed it is the reverse.

At this moment ever increasing numbers of its people are waking up to the sinister process that is usurping their cherished version of democracy and mobilising to resist it. 

Here in Ireland, we must do the same.

We will not allow the far right to pick apart the working class.

We must not allow the rot of inequality and lack of opportunity to continue to fester in our communities.

We can show that the politics of solidarity and the economics of good jobs, social justice and an active state can work.

These are our greatest bulwarks against a demise in democracy and against tech enabled authoritarianism.

And we must cheerlead for the EU to remember its roots, its very basis for inception- as peace project, designed to spread and deliver prosperity across Europe.

There can be a different Ireland an Ireland where the resources of our island are used for the greatest good.

Last year in the Presidential election, we saw what could happen when a positive, progressive, socialist platform comes together.

Before that we saw in Poland in 2023, that parties of the Left came together in common cause against the right.

Here in Ireland, that too can be our future. We have to go out, work hard and fight for it.