A sourced reference · justinbarrett.ie
Having lost the National Party, Justin Barrett founded Clann Éireann in April 2024. The Irish Times reported the group as having fewer than twenty members. The sourced record is below.
Clann Éireann is the organisation Mr Barrett established in April 2024, after his removal from the National Party and the Electoral Commission process that followed. It is a successor vehicle: a new name for the same project, minus the party he founded. The Irish Times reported the group as having fewer than twenty members. Wikipedia The Irish Times
In August 2024 Clann Éireann held a rally at Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork — the place where Michael Collins was killed in 1922 — at which masked men in black fatigues and balaclavas posed under tricolours and Clann Éireann banners. Cllr Shane O'Callaghan described the group as “a bunch of buffoons in fancy dress” whose ideology represented “the exact opposite of everything that Collins stood for”. Irish Examiner
The scale is part of the record. The man who in 2004 drew almost eleven thousand European votes now leads an organisation reported in single- or low-double-digit membership, best known for a costumed gathering at the grave-place of a figure whose politics it inverts. The trajectory is not editorial; it is arithmetic. The longer version is on the election-results page.
The text is original. No quotation has been invented; the quotations above are reproduced from The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner, and published in reliance on the truth (s.16) and public-interest (s.26) defences of the Defamation Act 2009. No claim is made that is not supported by the linked source. Corrections of fact, supplied with a public source, are welcome at info@justinbarrett.ie.
Better Barretts, better Justins · and one electorate
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
We counted, too: 10,997 votes in 2004; 183 in 2021.
“Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honour and love only what is true, declining to follow traditional opinions, if these be worthless.”
The name comes from the Latin iustus: just, upright. Some bearers took it seriously.
“183.”
Eleventh of fifteen candidates. The electorate has not been asked to elaborate.
“10,997.”
Seventeen years later, in Dublin Bay South: 183.
“1.”
The Electoral Commission ruled that meeting invalid. A later one was not.
“We have been stood on since 1745. We mention it only for context.”
That one is fiction, and labelled as such. The November 2023 incident it refers to is not.
Every quotation here is verbatim and in the public domain, or is a figure from the published record. No words have been put in Mr Barrett’s mouth. The one fictional speaker is a flight of steps, and says so.