My da always worked odd jobs. He never had much education past secondary school. For a while, he was a caretaker at a private school in Dublin, and we lived in a wee cottage on the grounds. The pay wasn’t amazing, but it was enough to support a family of four. My folks eventually bought a four-bed house outside Abbeyleix in the early 90s as essentially a holiday home.
I know that sounds fairly middle class by today’s miserable standards. But back then it was normal. I know a fella here in Edinburgh, who, around the same time, as a postman, bought a three-bed flat on Easter Road for twenty grand. He had a car, three kids, and a wife who didn’t need to work. That was standard. That was the life a worker could expect.
My da lost the caretaker job and my folks separated. And between then and now, I’ve had 21 addresses and I’m 34 years old. Emergency accommodation, mould-filled basements, derelict mobile homes, half-finished building sites, and outright homelessness. With no degree I became a bit of a factotum myself, chasing work – sound engineer, kitchen porter, labourer, union organiser, social worker. I built a house on an ex’s family land, and when we split, I was staring into the maw of the private rental market in post-crash Ireland. So I left.
I moved to Scotland because Ireland had become a hollowed-out, prostituted mess that I could no longer afford to live in. It is the brutalised chew toy tossed between the three imperial forces of the US, the UK, and the EU. I watched as NAMA was formed, as ghost estates rotted alongside record homelessness in what was, on paper, an extremely rich nation. I watched as Leo Varadkar oversaw the social murder of those women with substandard cervical checks – a brazen act of Thatcherite number-crunching – and then literally bulldozed the homeless off the streets. So much that should have radicalised us all. But I didn’t stay and fight, I emigrated. Like so many before me and so many since, I saw my struggle as merely personal, individual, and not collective. Ireland had bested me.
Now I’m here, closer to the “imperial core,” in Britain’s second financial city. And I see clearly that it is from here that Ireland takes its cues, its policy, and often its state personnel. The same landlords, the same financial speculators, the same rotten system and the same brutalised working class. For the same rent I paid for a garden shed in rural Wexford, I got a flat in Edinburgh’s Southside. Three years later, that flat jumped from £900 to £1,750 a month. I now live in Muirhouse, the second most deprived area in Edinburgh.
So why am I, an Irishman, standing in the Holyrood election? Because I am done running. I am done seeing this struggle as individual. Through my work in the trade unions, my tenancy union, and my time as a community councillor, I have come to see that all these individual fights are deeply collective as well as deeply personal.
I’m not young anymore, I’m middle aged. I want to start a family. But I want my kids to be safe, to be sorted, to be able to live to their full potential. And I want that for all kids. Contesting elections is just another legitimate avenue to fight for our class. It is a thermometer to gauge the revolutionary capacity of the electorate. It is an opportunity to point out the farcical nature of representational democracy when we know policy is dictated by big business and our elected representatives are merely our favourite brand of managers of decline.
I’m standing not because I think I know best, but because I believe our communities themselves know best how to manage themselves. These issues are not abstract for me. I know poverty. I’ve lived it and I continue to live it. I am simply doing my duty as a communist in the interest of my class and only my class.
We must take up every possible fight to grow class consciousness, deepen contradictions, and win for our class. That is the path to Connolly’s vision: a 32-county socialist worker’s republic, ruled by, for, and of the working class. The same fight rages here. I’m an Irishman but I’m an internationalist and I will no longer sit idly by and watch as Britain’s working class are pushed out of secure employment with deindustrialisation and the ruling class’s salivation for war.
Chris Cullen is standing in the Scottish Parliament elections on May 7th as a member of the Communist Party of Britain in the Edinburgh and Lothians East region.
