From the H-Blocks to the Inbox

Séamus Fitzsimons

3 min read

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The Unending Campaign of Political Intimidation.

Remember that magical feeling on Christmas morning? Your ma and da, unknown to you, working tirelessly to create a moment of pure joy. Now, picture volunteers working to bring that same magic to children who have a parent in prison. Their mission is simple: to ensure a child whose world has been fractured still feels remembered and loved.

These are the individuals now being systematically targeted. To an outside observer, the news might be of text messages from a hidden number or a frozen bank account. But for people in these communities, this is just a new layer of fear painted over the old one. The heavy knock on the door in the dark never stopped. People are still taken away. The state didn’t replace its tactics, it added to its arsenal.

For those who remember the Troubles, the pattern is chillingly familiar. The goal is the same: to attack an entire community structure at every point.

The prisoner in the cell and the volunteer with the wrapped gift are two sides of the same coin. One represents the resistance, the other represents the solidarity that sustains it. The state understands that to break one, it must break the other. Then, it was the black taxi stopped at the checkpoint. Now, it’s your bank account frozen by a distant treasury. Both are checkpoints. One controls your movement, the other your livelihood. Both aim to isolate and demoralize. Then, the weapon was the rumor and the smear in the press. Now, it is the same, amplified by sensational headlines and a digital paper trail designed to criminalize compassion itself. - Séamus Fitzsimons

The old war learned new tricks. It kept the battering ram and added the text message. For a new generation, this digital and financial intimidation is their first taste of the conflict. For their parents and grandparents, it is a grim confirmation that the campaign never truly ended, it has simply expanded its list of targets.

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They have always understood that their most formidable enemy is the unbreakable network of mutual aid. The committees that organised material support for the families of prisoners then are the same spirit driving the welfare work that ensures those families today are not forgotten at Christmas. They are not separate endeavours, they are the same lifeline. And that is why they are both treated as a threat.

The state’s campaign of intimidation, from the text message to the dawn raid, is a testament to its own failure. It reveals a strategy reliant on fear, because it lacks any moral authority.

But these tactics are ultimately futile. Their power is negative. It can harass, it can freeze accounts, it can create hardship. Yet, it is incapable of the smallest positive act of humanity. It cannot deliver a gift. It cannot build community. It cannot offer comfort.

We can. We do. And we will continue.

Our resilience is not a reaction to their actions, it is a precondition of our existence. Their campaign will inevitably subside, as it always has, into another chapter of its own defeat.

Our work, however, remains. Unbroken.