New Year Message 2025/2026

NEW YEAR STATEMENT 2026

FROM THE 32 COUNTY SOVEREIGNTY MOVEMENT

The 32 County Sovereignty Movement extends New Years greetings to all our comrades at home and abroad who are involved in the struggle to uphold and protect their sovereign rights.

We specifically mention Palestine at this time and extend our solidarity to the Palestinian people. So many times throughout our history, Ireland and Palestine’s paths have crossed and today is no different.

We are all too familiar with the tokenism of the West when it comes to sovereignty and self-determination. The hollow words from the colonial West, declaring that they recognise a Palestinian state, are an attempt to conceal their direct involvement in the genocide in Palestine and to alleviate pressure from their own people, who are strongly opposed to the Zionist project.

Nowhere in their statements do they uphold the right of the Palestinian people, under international law, to the return of their stolen lands and the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees who have been illegally displaced from those lands.

Instead, what we are witnessing is a so-called peace plan designed by Zionists in both so-called Israel and the USA, one that will expand stolen lands through settlements, further ethnically cleanse Palestinians through relocation, and demilitarise Gaza by crushing any resistance. It would deploy an international stabilisation force composed of Israeli and Western forces and install a transitional Palestinian government under international supervision, made up of hand-picked individuals willing, for a handsome sum, to serve as a front for this takeover.

The very same smoke-and-mirrors politics have been used here in Ireland for hundreds of years, and we are only too aware that the word of the British establishment means as much as the word of the Zionist regime. Absolutely nothing.

The question of Irish national sovereignty must once again become the central catalyst around which Irish republicanism must coalesce. Its continuing violation by the Westminster Parliament is strategically evolving to ensure the UK’s long-term military and economic interests in Ireland, as global politics enters a new phase of military supremacy and economic protectionism.

In a recent article in the Irish News, Provisional Sinn Féin President Mary McDonald laments the lack of enthusiasm within the Dublin political establishment to actively pursue, let alone advocate for, the calling of a border poll. By describing such a poll as the “beating heart” of the Good Friday Agreement, she offers a stark admission of the abject failure of a political strategy wholly dependent on a so-called “pan-nationalist consensus” to advance it.

In an even more bizarre pronouncement, Provisional representative Declan Kearney, speaking at an international conference organised in Turkey by the Kurdish nationalist Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party, stated: “The Good Friday Agreement was between Ireland and Britain and it still holds. We haven’t finished our work in 27 years. The British Parliament’s control over Irish territory has been removed.”

Whether this can be described as conceited hubris or gross political naivety, the completely exposed PSF position on the restoration of our national sovereignty is reduced to performing CPR on the Boundary Commission, ultimately recognised by Michael Collins as a “monumental deception.”

The struggle to end the violation of our national sovereignty by the Westminster Parliament and the struggle to forge a viable and functioning Republic are one and the same. A so-called United Ireland is too vague a description to render it an objective, in any sense, of Irish republicanism. Building what we seek to establish is the surest means of defeating all those who stand in our way, both British and Irish.

The political reasoning behind partition alters and adapts to the differing needs of the British establishment to preserve it. And because the Good Friday Agreement does not oblige the Twenty-Six County State to pursue the ending of partition, those British needs will go unchallenged. This is the political and constitutional vacuum which Irish republicans must fill. This task must, first and foremost, be represented by our national flag and its true republican origins.

Of late, a false and deceitful dichotomy has emerged regarding the flying of our national flag within our communities. We are not confined to narrow nationalism nor restrictive protocols. The national flag should be hoisted in every community as a definitive act of sovereignty, an act that demands an end to British Parliamentary activity in our country, a public housing programme to finally end homelessness, a robust policy of active neutrality, a coherent and realistic immigration policy that is not driven by exploitative financial interests or emotional and denigrating rhetoric, and a parliamentary system of governance based on merit and true representative democracy. Our national flag is a product of true republican ideals, and flying it should be a daily reminder of those ideals and a censure on those who fail to uphold them.

As we bring to a close 2025 let us look to the future and reaffirm our commitment to the struggle for sovereignty and self-determination, as envisaged in the democratically endorsed 1919 Declaration of Independence.

Beir bua.