Sinn Féin Shared a Platform With the Far Right and Said Nothing. People Before Profit Named Them as Frauds.

Fuel protests & the ghost of the gilets jaunes

TL;DR: Two parties on the Irish left faced the same crisis and made opposite choices. People Before Profit showed up at the fuel protests with a costed programme: price caps now, windfall taxes on energy company profits, renationalisation of the energy sector, free public transport as the transition, and the explicit naming of the far right as frauds rather than representatives of working-class anger. Sinn Féin helped create the political conditions for the protests, then found themselves outmaneuvered by forces less constrained by the requirements of a party preparing for government — and ended up sharing a platform with the far right without naming them. The difference is not tactical. It is the difference between a politics that names the system and a politics that names the government. Sinn Féin’s rightward drift did not begin with these protests. But it arrived here visibly. The French gilets jaunes of 2018 offer a cautionary precedent: even when the left gets the instincts right, getting the outcome right is another matter entirely. There is no easy way forward. But there is a wrong way, and Ireland has just demonstrated it in real time.

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Two parties on the Irish left faced the same burning roundabout and made opposite choices. People Before Profit showed up with a programme. Sinn Féin showed up with a tax cut. The difference between those two responses is not tactical. It is the difference between a politics that names the system and a politics that names the government — and it will determine which tendency the European left follows when the next convoy blocks the next refinery.

Whitegate oil refinery, County Cork, April 11. Tractors on the access road. A Public Order Unit deploying pepper spray. Army recovery vehicles requisitioned by the Gardaí. And Malachy Steenson, veteran of anti-immigrant mobilisations across the Republic, publicly associated with and actively promoting the blockades.

This is the scene the European left needs to reckon with. Not as a reason for relief that the state eventually cleared the road. As a question: when the roundabout is occupied and the political interior of a movement is genuinely contested, what does the left do?

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The Movement’s Two Faces

Start with what the protests actually were, because the specifics matter.

Christopher Duffy, a small haulage contractor two months from business collapse by his own account, organised convoys. Genuine economic desperation, genuinely working-class in origin. Steenson, whose political history is documented in anti-immigrant activism and not in haulage, was a visible public presence at the demonstrations and was actively calling for participation. Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan stated on April 9 that the protests were being “manipulated by outside actors,” naming specifically British far-right figure Tommy Robinson as seeking to exploit the situation. On April 8, O’Callaghan warned that “democracy cannot be dictated to by an unelected group” and confirmed the government would use the Defence Forces to assist Gardaí in clearing blockades at critical infrastructure. Taoiseach Micheál Martin called the Whitegate blockade an “act of national sabotage.”

These were not the same people or the same politics operating within the same movement. PBP’s own April 12 statement gave the most precise class characterisation of what was actually happening: “This movement is led by people who own companies, employ workers and have access to expensive machinery. Though workers and farmers are present in numbers, they are not dictating the pace or demands at this stage.” Far-right figures were, in that statement’s formulation, “hovering at its edges” — present, purposeful, and with their own agenda, but not in sole command of a movement whose base was genuinely working-class and petty-bourgeois in distress.

What distinguished Ireland 2026 from earlier patterns is precisely that hovering: in key locations, far-right figures were providing digital signal boosting, rhetorical defiance, and organisational presence that kept the blockades in place after the initial wave of genuine industrial grievance had done its work. Steenson’s public role in actively promoting the protests is documented. The government’s strategy was to use that presence as political cover for refusing to negotiate with blockade organisers, framing the movement’s leadership as an “unelected group” and linking it to international far-right figures — effectively separating “legitimate” haulier grievances from “illegal” methods in order to end the protests once a financial package was announced on April 14.

The trigger for all of this was a war-driven energy shock. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the escalation of the Iran conflict pushed diesel from roughly €1.70 to over €2.17 per litre in weeks; home heating oil nearly doubled. By April 10-11, roughly 600 of Ireland’s 1,500 filling stations were without fuel. Almost 320,000 households were already in arrears on electricity and gas bills before the crisis peaked. The anger was legitimate. The question was who would give it political direction.

Among those who emerged as Dublin protest spokesperson was John Dallon, who stated publicly that “the city will be cleared” if the government agreed to meet. The political character of the movement’s organisational core was not incidental to its demands.

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People Before Profit: A Programme, Not a Press Release

Paul Murphy went to O’Connell Bridge. He was met with far-right agitators screaming about gender ideology, was forced to leave. He said publicly that this changed nothing. His party’s support for the protests continued.

What followed was more than a gesture. PBP published a costed emergency programme — Cut Costs Not Living Standards: An Emergency Plan to Tackle the Fuel Crisis and Break from Fossil Capitalism — whose architecture deserves to be named specifically, because it is the clearest illustration of what distinguishes a transitional programme from a fiscal one.

The immediate demands: price caps on petrol and diesel at €1.75 per litre, green diesel at €1, home heating oil at €1. Cap electricity at 25 cent per unit and gas at 8 cent. A €500 universal energy credit. These are the demands that meet people where their anger actually is.

Then the structural demands that point beyond the government toward the system: windfall taxes on energy companies’ record profits. Renationalisation of the energy sector — “introducing price controls while leaving the energy market in private hands will result in subsidising private energy companies,” the document states directly; renationalisation is the necessary complement to price caps, not an optional extra. Democratic ownership of the energy system as the mechanism for driving the renewable transition. A €5 billion state investment in renewable energy.

Then the funding mechanisms that name the actual enemy: a levy on data centres, which consume more electricity than all homes in the state while paying half what households pay per unit; abolition of the carbon tax funded not by leaving polluters untouched but by “additional corporation tax for the worst polluters and introduction of a commercial aviation tax.” End sweetheart electricity deals for data centres. Ban new data centre construction. US military out of Irish airports and skies — naming Shannon Airport’s role in facilitating the Iran war that drove the energy shock in the first place.

And the demand that the April 12 statement made most urgently: “We must demand that our unions enter the fight.” The trade union movement had “completely failed to give any lead on the cost-of-living crisis. In that vacuum, people will turn to whoever appears willing to fight.” That sentence is the most important thing PBP said during this crisis. It explains the dual character of the movement, names the structural cause of far-right entrism, and points toward the strategic response simultaneously. It is also a self-critique, because PBP is not the trade union movement and cannot substitute for it.

On the far right, the April 12 statement was unambiguous: “Some of the loudest figures attaching themselves to these protests are cheerleaders for Trump, for racism, and in some cases for Israel. They want to blame migrants, LGBT people or whoever else is convenient, instead of the profiteers, war-makers and politicians actually responsible. The people who gave Paul Murphy and People Before Profit hassle on O’Connell bridge this week were not farmers defending their livelihoods. They were political grifters trying to drag this movement in a poisonous direction.”

Political grifters. That is the right characterisation and it is PBP’s own. The analysis was deployed publicly and in writing from April 12. The question is not whether PBP had the programme. They had it and it was costed. The question is organisational.

Des Derwin puts it like this: PBP and the broader left already had a vehicle for exactly the kind of broadened working-class campaign the situation demanded. The Affordable Ireland Campaign, designed to aggregate cost-of-living grievances across communities without the political contamination the fuel protests carried, was not given serious thought before the rush to support the blockades. PBP’s own April 12 statement acknowledges this: “We initiated the Affordable Ireland Campaign and will be talking to others in the Campaign about the steps necessary to build that movement now.” Whether that commitment receives genuine organisational priority after the blockades subside will say more about PBP’s strategic direction than anything that happened at Whitegate.

The programme was right. The analysis was right. The question that remains is whether PBP has the organisational reach to drive both consistently into the spaces where the movement actually lives — and that question was not settled in April.

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Sinn Féin: The Rightward Drift Arrives at the GPO

Sinn Féin’s approach was the opposite of PBP’s, and more revealing for being so — because it was not improvised. It was the logical expression of a political direction that has been consolidating for some time.

Sinn Féin had been building toward these protests since early March, when TD Donna McGettigan publicly backed a fuel-price protest campaign and criticised rising fuel costs and government inaction. The party’s legislative vehicle was their Mineral Oil Tax (Emergency Cost of Living Reduction) Bill: a calculated attempt to capture public frustration and channel it toward Sinn Féin’s electoral profile.

By April 7, the protests had escalated into the blockade of Dublin. Sinn Féin TDs Matt Carthy and others joined Independent Ireland’s Michael Collins and Aontú’s Peadar Tóibín on a makeshift stage outside the GPO. There is no evidence in the primary record that Sinn Féin spokespersons on that platform named the far-right presence in the protests, or distinguished their support from that of formations with a documented reactionary agenda.

Then the blockades escalated beyond Sinn Féin’s comfort zone. Whitegate. The army on standby. The Taoiseach’s “act of national sabotage.” Independent Ireland, unburdened by the requirements of a party preparing for government, could embrace the blockades without qualification. Their MEP Ciarán Mullooly publicly urged the government to meet fuel-protest representatives as the Tullamore bypass blockade continued. Pearse Doherty was in the Dáil clashing with the Tánaiste over fuel allowance extensions. The difference between those two positions is the difference between a party that could afford to be on the street and a party that had already calculated it could not.

Sinn Féin was left supporting a movement they had helped animate but could no longer direct. A Sinn Féin Senator was photographed with Christopher Duffy. The party’s response — “our public representatives were not responsible for the views and opinions of people with whom they are photographed” — is the kind of statement that will age very badly very quickly.

And the programme remained thin throughout. Mary Lou McDonald promised a permanent reduction in fuel prices saving drivers €7 a tank, to be achieved by reversing the August and October 2025 tax increases. Pearse Doherty called for scrapping future carbon tax rises. That is the complete programme. The state charges too much in excise. Sinn Féin will charge less. Market price of fuel: a natural fact. Private ownership of the energy system: not mentioned.

Compare that directly to PBP. PBP also calls for abolishing the carbon tax on ordinary households — but funds it by additional corporation tax on the worst polluters and a commercial aviation tax. The costs are shifted to capital. Sinn Féin simply removes them, leaving the structural question of who pays entirely unaddressed. By locating the problem entirely in government taxation policy, Sinn Féin’s framing converges with the far right’s. Both say the enemy is the state’s take. Neither says anything about the oil companies’ take, the privatised distribution network’s take, or the structural subordination of a high car-dependency rural economy to global commodity markets. The far right fills that silence with conspiracy. Sinn Féin fills it with nothing.

This is not a new problem. It is the arrival point of a drift. A party that once had a coherent anti-austerity economic analysis has increasingly substituted the rhetoric of fiscal management for the politics of class. The logic of preparing for government produces its own gravitational pull: don’t frighten the farmers, don’t alienate the small business owners, keep the coalition options open. The fuel protests did not create this tendency. They revealed how far it has already travelled.

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France 2018: The Warning That Cuts Both Ways

In November 2018, a movement erupted across provincial France that the left had not seen coming and did not know how to handle. The gilets jaunes — yellow vests, the high-visibility jackets French motorists are required to carry — began as a protest against a fuel tax increase tied to climate policy. Within weeks it had become something much larger and harder to categorise: a nationwide occupation of roundabouts and motorway junctions by working-class and lower-middle-class people who described themselves, in large numbers, as “neither left nor right.”

They were not that, of course. Nothing in politics is. The academic consensus on the movement’s composition is instructive: far-right frames and activists were present from the start, particularly in some regional mobilisations with high Rassemblement National voter overlap, but they were never structurally dominant. The left was also present, and as the movement developed its demands broadened from the fuel tax toward purchasing power, social inequality and direct democracy. What the gilets jaunes were, consistently and throughout, was ideologically heterogeneous: a multi-polar protest space in which incompatible political traditions coexisted under a shared anti-elite umbrella, with no leadership hierarchy and no party or union capable of setting the agenda.

That description should sound familiar. It is precisely the structure of the Irish fuel protests of April 2026. The roundabout is the same. The dual character is the same. The far right present and purposeful within a movement whose base was genuinely working-class is the same. And the question the left faced in France in 2018 is the question the Irish left faced this month.

Lutte Ouvrière did not do what the standard account sometimes suggests. They did not stand aside. Their December 2018 congress document — primary source verified, readable on their website — shows comrades going to the barricades from the movement’s earliest weeks, having discussions, distributing politics. Their position was class-differentiated engagement: address the proletarian elements of the movement specifically, fight within it for a class analysis, refuse to endorse its overall inter-class direction wholesale. They aimed to separate the class interests of workers from the petty-bourgeois elements within the same movement. PBP’s April 12 statement is this approach in practice.

Both currents that later emerged from the NPA’s 2022 split were present at the blockades in 2018. The divergence came later, in the conclusions each drew from the movement’s decline. The current that became NPA-Anticapitalistes concluded that spontaneous struggle without a viable political outlet produces a vicious circle: radicalised anger, police repression, no institutional change. That reading pointed eventually toward the Nouveau Front Populaire. The current that became NPA-Révolutionnaires drew the opposite lesson: the failure was the absence of an independent revolutionary pole capable of holding the movement’s energy without dissolving it into coalitions. The split formalised at the 5th Congress in December 2022, three competing platforms, neither faction decisive, two organisations both continuing to claim the NPA name.

Neither reading was wrong about everything. What both share is the recognition that the movement required a programme capable of pointing its anger beyond the government toward the system. LO had that programme. PBP had it, costed and published. In both cases the programme was not sufficient to capture the movement’s direction, because capturing a movement’s direction requires organisational weight that neither formation possessed at the critical moment.

The actual failure in France was the union confederations. The CGT’s Philippe Martinez declared it “impossible to imagine the CGT marching alongside the Front National,” and used that as grounds for hostility to a movement of tens of thousands of working-class people who had nothing to do with the FN. PBP identified this pattern explicitly: the trade union movement had completely failed to give any lead. Labour’s Ivana Bacik urging protesters to end the blockades, the Social Democrats calling road blockades “wrong,” Roderic O’Gorman requesting the Defence Forces clear routes: this is the Irish CGT response. It will not age well.

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No Easy Way Forward

The lesson of Ireland 2026 and France 2018 taken together resists the clean conclusion.

PBP got the instinct right and the programme right. The April 12 statement named the far right as frauds, gave a precise class characterisation of the movement, called the unions to account, connected Shannon Airport to the fuel crisis, and committed to building the Affordable Ireland Campaign as the broader vehicle. The costed programme is the most complete transitional energy programme produced by any Irish left formation during this crisis. Set against Sinn Féin’s tax cuts, it is not a close comparison.

But LO had that bridge in 2018. Present, organised, analytically serious. The movement still declined without the left capturing its direction. Programme without the organisational weight to drive it into the physical spaces where the movement lives is necessary but not sufficient.

The pattern of far-right entrism into cost-of-living movements is consistent. The Dutch farmers’ protests, the 2022 trucker convoys, the Irish fuel crisis: in each case, far-right formations arrived with organisation, clarity of message, and willingness to name enemies. In each case the left was divided between abstention and endorsement without programme. Neither worked.

What Ireland 2026 adds to that pattern is the specific indictment of a politics that tries to occupy a middle position: endorsing the mood, scrapping the carbon tax, sharing the platform, saying nothing about who owns the refinery. Sinn Féin’s response was not a failure of nerve. It was a failure of analysis, and it reflects a political direction that has been consolidating for long enough that it should be named as such.

The roundabout is not going away. The energy crisis is structural, the cost-of-living pressure is ongoing, and the far right has learned how to organise in economic distress faster than most of the left has learned to respond. Ireland 2026 is not an exception. It is the terrain. On that terrain, the choice between a programme and a tax cut is not a technical question. It is a political one. The left that cannot answer it will find the far right answering it instead.

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Postscript: What the Fact-Checking Changed, and What It Didn’t

Two claims in earlier versions of this article required correction after further verification.

The article initially stated that Malachy Steenson has been named in the Dáil by Justice Minister O’Callaghan. Perplexity and Gemini cross-checking found no verified record of O’Callaghan naming Steenson in Dáil proceedings or formal ministerial statements. What is verified: he had been named in the Dáil by Paul Murphy, the PBP TD; O’Callaghan stated on April 9 that protesters were being “manipulated by outside actors,” named Tommy Robinson specifically as seeking to exploit the situation, and on April 8 warned that “democracy cannot be dictated to by an unelected group.” Steenson’s public role in promoting the protests is documented through media reporting and his own social media. The two facts — O’Callaghan’s “outside actors” framing and Steenson’s visible presence — are both real, but the article should not imply a direct ministerial naming that the record does not support. The text above has been corrected accordingly.

A claim about Revenue judgments against a named protest organiser has been removed entirely. Gemini flagged that the individual named in earlier research documents may have been confused with someone else of the same name. A named Revenue judgment against a living individual requires unambiguous primary source verification of identity before publication. That verification was not possible in a quick and easy way. The claim is out.

These corrections do not alter the article’s core argument. They do illustrate why we keep comments open on Red Mole, and understand that accurate information is a team sport that the left often plays poorly, relying on limited insights. That is the process working as it should, despite the embarrassment of self-correction.

A further challenge to the article’s framing arrived in the comments from a reader. The exchange is worth reproducing:

“There’s a danger in allowing the press releases to be the story here. In real terms PBP are the smallest part of a rickety anti-FFG coalition, within which SF is absolutely hegemonic. PBP are dependent on their transfers, work with them on a local level and have committed to going into government with them on some sort of a united front basis. I don’t say this to be annoying but just that it’s a bigger predicament than supposedly class independent programmes can solve.”

The response offered here: PBP’s position is to offer external support to a Sinn Féin government that implements a minimum programme of reforms — which Sinn Féin will almost certainly not implement.

The commenter’s rejoinder: “That’s certainly the way elements within the party phrase it. Insofar as it’s the case, again it’s a case of programme over concrete, not least in supporting SF so they can fail demonstratively.”

This is the sharpest structural challenge the article faces, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a defensive one. The commenter is right that PBP’s class independence is real at the level of programme but constrained at the level of electoral arithmetic. The question of whether “external support contingent on a minimum programme” in practice becomes unconditional support for an SF government that delivers none of it is not answered by the programme document alone. It is answered by what PBP does when Sinn Féin fails to implement the programme — whether they withdraw support publicly, build the Affordable Ireland Campaign as a counter-pressure, and use the failure demonstratively as the commenter suggests, or whether the logic of keeping the coalition together overrides the programme’s conditionality.

That is the test ahead. The fuel protests showed PBP’s politics at their best. What happens in government — or in the anteroom of government — will show whether those politics can survive contact with the gravitational pull that has already reshaped Sinn Féin.

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Sourcing note: This article has been through multiple rounds of fact-checking via Perplexity and Gemini. Claims about O’Callaghan’s statements are sourced to RTÉ reporting of April 8-9, 2026. The Steenson characterisation is based on media reporting of his public role in promoting the protests. The Revenue judgments claim has been removed following verification concerns. John Dallon’s name and quote are sourced to the Irish Times. The Donna McGettigan characterisation reflects what the Clare Herald primary source confirms. The Mullooly characterisation reflects his documented public backing for the protests. PBP programme claims are sourced directly to the “Cut Costs Not Living Standards” document and the April 12, April 14, and April 15 PBP statements. The Lutte Ouvrière December 2018 document is primary source verified. NPA congress proceedings are drawn from Wikipedia’s summary of the 2022 proceedings. AI-generated research inputs were cross-checked via Perplexity and Gemini before publication; where cross-checking identified inaccuracies, claims have been corrected or removed.