Stardust Campaigner Wrong To Stand For Nazi National Party

In a case of tragic irony Stardust campaigner Antoinette Keegan has announced she will be standing for the fascist National Party in the coming election - a party that wants an authoritarian state, a return to the dark days of Church abuse and cover up and who champion acts of arson.

Victims of the establishment, like those who have campaigned for years after the Stardust fire, should be for a less authoritarian state. A glance at the history and politics of the National Party shows they are anti-working class and should be opposed by every worker who can see clearly.

The National Party stood at the gates of Dáil Eireann in July 2020 brandishing placards with nooses on them. They wanted to conflate homosexuality and paedophila to tarnish a Green Party TD. It’s an age old fascist trick designed to mobilise violence against all LGBTQ people.

The far right would love to ‘hang them all’ - meaning anyone who disagrees with their fascist point of view. When a few anti-fascists set up a sound system across the road the crowd was whipped into a frenzy by former National Party leader Justin Barrett - the anti-fascist sound system was smashed.

The National Party was founded by Justin Barrett. He came from establishment politics - he was once a member of Young Fine Gael but left to become the leader of the anti-abortion Catholic group “Youth Defence”. “Everything changed when the X case happened in 1992” he said.

While the X case prompted a generation of young people to fight against the Catholic Church hierarchy, a group of seven young middle class pro-lifers, including Niamh Nic Mhathúna, her sister Una Nic Mhathúna, and Peter Scully, organised a protest outside the Supreme Court to stop a 14 year-old rape victim from travelling for an abortion.

They wanted a child victim of rape held against her will. Justin Barrett was also the chair of “Youth Against Divorce” - despite holding extreme views on the role of women in marriage he went and divorced his wife and had a bunch of kids with his babysitter. Typical fascist hypocrite.

In 2004 he stood for the European election on an anti-immigrant platform before launching the National Party in 2016. This party wanted clerical fascism - a more extreme version of the Archbishop McQuaid days, when women were locked away in laundries and children were routinely raped by priests.

Barrett was also intimately connected to the European neo-Nazi movement - in 2000 he’d spoken at a neo-Nazi rally in Passau in Germany at which the far right crowd gave standing ovations to aging Nazis who quoted Hitler.

In June 2001 Justin Barrett attended fascist events in Italy. He spoke at a Forza Nuova meeting in Milan in November 2002. Barrett shared a platform with fascist Roberto Fiore at a rally at the Hotel Miramar on the 20th and 21st of July 2001.

In 2017 Barrett said his party was only for “straight Irish people”, he is a Holocaust justifier and regularly quotes Hitler. His own supporters complained - not because they disagreed with the Hitler quotes - but because he was letting the public see their private face.

In September 2024 he described his hero Hitler as the “greatest leader of all time.” The National Party split - with divisions emerging between Barrett and wealthy farmer and party deputy leader James Reynolds.

Reynolds had previously worked with millionaire Declan Ganley in his Libertas movement before joining the National Party. He was suspended from the IFA in 2012 for “bringing the county executive into disrepute”.

In July 2023, Justin Barrett said that gold bars valued at €400,000 had been stolen from a vault by party members including James Reynolds. The National Party then claimed that Barrett had been removed as leader.

Since the election of Cllr Patrick Quinlin in the local elections the leadership role has passed to him. But the politics of the organisation hasn’t changed one bit. Their real aim is to organise a movement of political violence to establish a catholic dictatorship.

On Telegram and in private chats their members regularly fantasise about mass murder. They regularly display the political violence at the heart of every fascist movement:

At a protest on the 12th September 2020, a member, Michael Quinn, assaulted LGBTQ activist Izzy Kamikaze with a wooden plank wrapped in the Irish flag, while she was observing the protest. He split her head open and she was photographed with blood streaming down her face.

National Party member 61-year-old John Tate was charged with setting fire to the Luas as part of a racist riot that destroyed our inner city. This fascist riot attacked bus and luas drivers and intimidated hospital workers.

At the heart of every fascist movement is the goal of using political violence to eliminate union members, LGBTQ people, minorities and anyone who disagrees with their rotten vision - all the time being a voice for Irish bosses and landlords.

They admit they are pro-capitalist: “The National Party believes in free productive enterprise and reward for fair labour.” So Irish billionaires like Denis O’Brien and Larry Goodman buying up hospitals is OK in their book? Irish landlords evicting workers is OK? Pathetic.

Thankfully they’ve only one councillor but there are lots of confused and angry people out there. The National Party needs to be confronted and stopped before it ever grows into a threat to all decent working class people in Ireland.

The memory of the Stardust victims is tarnished by association with these fascists.