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Clann Éireannwhat Justin Barrett founded after the National Party

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.

I. What it is

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

II. The Béal na Bláth rally (August 2024)

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

Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork
Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork. The crossroads where Michael Collins was killed in August 1922, and the site of the August 2024 Clann Éireann rally described above.

III. The arithmetic of it

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.

IV. A note on this 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.