30/01/2026
In 2026, the title patriot is abused by criminals, serial rapists, racists, drug dealers and predators, hollow men and women who cloak themselves in the tricolour while serving hatred and Ireland’s real enemies. These self-titled patriots never resisted British rule, never defended Irish sovereignty, never sacrificed for the Republic.
Our new series 'Real Patriots' restores the word’s true meaning, honouring Irish revolutionaries who fought empire, reclaimed our dignity and gave everything for national liberation and the people of Ireland.
No.1 in our series, Real Patriots.
James Fintan Lalor
An Gorta Mór, the Genocide was not a natural disaster but a British colonial crime. Between 1845 and 1850, more than one million Irish people, overwhelmingly Gaelic speaking were allowed to die of starvation and disease while food was exported under armed guard from Irish soil. Millions more were driven into forced emigration. This was policy, a deliberate British response to an “excess” native population, deliberate genocide through starvation, eviction and exile.
In those terrible years, nearly every Irish family without wealth or privilege suffered grievous loss. The countryside was emptied, communities shattered and our people broken in the interests of empire, profit and landlord power. British rule revealed itself not merely as unjust, but as murderous.
It was in the depths of this national catastrophe, and in the aftermath of Black ’47, that James Fintan Lalor raised his voice in defiance. Through the pages of The Irish Felon, Lalor rejected appeals to moderation or mercy and called instead for revolutionary action against British rule and the landlord system that sustained it. He understood that famine was not an accident of nature, but the logical outcome of colonial exploitation.
Lalor exposed the central truth of Ireland’s oppression, that British domination depended on a native gombeen and landlord class willing to collaborate in the destruction of their own people. He insisted that Ireland could never be free while this class retained power and that the land itself must be reclaimed for the nation. Faced with a “general writ of ejectment” served upon the Irish people, Lalor demanded resistance under the higher law of justice and nature.
He denied utterly that the landlord class formed part of the Irish nation, branding them strangers to the land and enemies of the people, tyrants in Ireland and servants of empire and greed.
James Fintan Lalor was one of the clearest republican thinkers of the Genocide era. A man who named British policy for what it was, and who insisted that true Irish freedom must rest on national independence, social justice, and the people’s right to the land.
" The principle I state and mean to stand upon is this: that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland".
Somewhere, somehow, and by somebody, a beginning must be made and that the first act of resistance is always, and must be ever, premature, imprudent, and dangerous.” James Fintan Lalor.
