Today in Ireland, the top 1 percent are not paying their way — that being their rightful contribution to the tax base and public purse. This, notwithstanding the pillaging of the Troika, is fundamental to the financial shortages hollowing out our public services.
Under the Irish Republic, there must and will be a real change in this regard, for the notion of the rich freeloading off the people is an anathema to its fundamental basis: equal rights and equal opportunity, with the ownership of Ireland for the people of Ireland.
A ‘United Ireland’ that fails to uphold, though, the sovereignty and unity of the Irish Republic would stand to continue the counterrevolution, which has held us in its thrall since the days of the Treaty.
As a revised continuum of the current system, which elevates capital over the common wealth, such an arrangement would be outside of Republicanism. It would ensure that the standing order, whose primary function is to shield wealth from its obligations, would have forward status into a ‘new dispensation’.
Only a fresh start mounted on the 1916 Proclamation — which the constitutional process serves to usurp — can establish an Ireland as that now required. While constitutionalism offers the notion of change, it intends on preserving the established order on and into a supposed ‘new Ireland’, this at the expense of the Irish Republic.
There remains, then, no viable route to the Republic through the employ or internalising of established constitutionalism, of its political theory or its political means. There remains no other route to the Republic than to stand by its right to proceed — which is fundamental.
The constitutional process and the constraints it seeks to legitimise — which provide for the façade of change, not the means for its actuation — cannot deliver on equal opportunity in an Ireland belonging to her people, as was intended upon the formation of the Republic.
It cannot make good the grievous reality that the Ireland of today is an Ireland for the powerful, where ordinary people and communities must suffer that the rich and the privileged can go free. It is intended, instead, towards a further bulwark between the Irish Republic and vested power, whose roots lie in British imperialism. We must, thus, resist its allure.
A century forward from the founding of the Republic, there can be no disregarding of its political basis if we are seriously intent upon change — not if the Ireland we are set toward is to differ, in real terms, from that we already reside in.
Sean Bresnahan, Chair, Thomas Ashe Society Omagh blogs at An Claidheamh Soluis 
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