Nuisance is just one word that comes to mind when contemplating the extraordinary assortment of freemen of the land, republican legitimists and assorted eccentrics who make up the contemporary Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
Appearing on the political scene around the tail end of the Crash, the IRB is a rather loopy and fractious collective of self-styled ‘sovereign citizens’ that have haunted the outer edges of any attempt to marshal community dissent towards mass migration and the EU.
Although occasionally encountered in the wider orbit of anti-government agitation, the IRB has proved difficult to classify ideologically. It is a movement that can sound like a dissident republican faction one minute and an American tax-protester convention the next. Perhaps understandably, mainstream journalists have generally preferred the all-purpose description of ‘conspiracy theorists’ to the more conventional ‘far right’, a label that scarcely captures the full peculiarities of the Brotherhood.
The group’s most recognisable contribution to Irish public life remains its annual ceremony at Dublin’s Mansion House, sometimes including Volunteer-era uniforms in which its self-styled presidente, Billy McGuire, turns a golden harp seven times to reaffirm the sovereignty of the Irish nation.
Precisely how Irish sovereignty might lapse without this procedure, or what would happen should the harp be turned only six times, has never been satisfactorily explained. Nevertheless, the ceremony has endured, presumably because the Republic cannot afford to take chances.
The Brotherhood claims descent from the original Fenian secret society founded in 1858, whose members helped bring about Irish independence before the organisation effectively disappeared in 1924. The modern outfit maintains that a constitutional authority of some description survived this dissolution, passing through an obscure chain of custodians until eventually arriving in the hands of McGuire, who claims to have inherited the presidency at the age of seven.
The subsequent history is more difficult to reconstruct, not least because rival claimants to the IRB name have managed to disagree over who actually runs it. One faction records a leadership rupture in 2018–19, while the organisation associated with McGuire subsequently acquired John Flanagan, a Clare businessman who became chairman of its Supreme Council in 2022. Even without territory, an electorate or international recognition, the Brotherhood has managed the distinctly Irish achievement of having a constitutional crisis.
To grasp the group in all its lovable eccentricity is to understand how it fuses republican legitimasm around the Free State and America-style sovereign citizen rhetoric, regarding itself and its ‘Cabinet’ as the functioning government of Ireland.
Somehow caught up in this administrative fantasia is former UCD professor Dolores Cahill, the anti-lockdown firebrand whose public career included an arrest warrant in Britain after failing to attend court and a confrontation over mask requirements at a Dublin Bay South election count. Cahill was appointed the Brotherhood’s purported chief justice before subsequently being removed.
Yet the whole business has lately taken an unexpectedly conventional turn. On 13 November, the Electoral Commission announced its intention to register IRB Home Affairs as a political party eligible to contest local elections, subject to a 21-day appeal period. The accompanying emblem appears to call the organisation the Irish Republic Brotherhood, omitting the rather important final syllable of ‘Republican’, while advertising a founding date at odds with the historical Brotherhood’s establishment in 1858.
The development raises the delightful possibility of an organisation which has spent years insisting that the existing state lacks legitimate authority now seeking permission from that same state to place its name on a ballot paper.
On a serious point with the broader Irish populist right, forever attempting to turn genuine public discontent into something resembling an organised political force, such characters represent a peculiar form of dead weight. Every effort to articulate a serious opposition to the political establishment risks being dragged back into the familiar company of self-appointed ministers, amateur constitutional scholars and men who believe the country can be reclaimed through an ingenious interpretation of paperwork.
The problem is not so much that these people are numerous, but that they are extraordinarily difficult to get rid of.
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