Sanders warns Ireland of oligarchy threat in Dublin speech

Bernie Sanders, at eighty-three, stood before an audience at Liberty Hall in Dublin on a Saturday evening to deliver a warning that stretched far beyond Ireland's borders. The Vermont senator had come to speak at the Robert Tressell Festival, and his message was direct: a new class of billionaires was consolidating power in ways that threatened democracy itself, and working people everywhere needed to recognize the threat and act.

Sanders framed the problem as fundamentally different from the wealth concentration of earlier eras. The rich have always sought tax breaks and fought unions, he acknowledged, but today's billionaires operate from a different premise entirely. They do not believe in government. They do not believe in democracy. They believe, he suggested, in something closer to the divine right of kings—that their intelligence and success in building technology companies grants them the right to rule, unencumbered by workers, unions, consumer groups, or democratic institutions. This was not mere greed; it was an ideology of dominion.

The mechanism of their power, Sanders argued, was technology itself. Artificial intelligence and robotics were being deployed not to improve life for workers but to eliminate jobs and undercut labor's bargaining power. He pointed to recent cuts in federal employment as a signal being sent to every corporation in America: automation could replace your workforce, and if workers objected, machines were coming anyway. The technology existed to create abundance for everyone, Sanders insisted, but instead it was being weaponized to concentrate wealth further and leave workers with less security and fewer options.

Sanders also turned his attention to the Democratic Party, which he said had abandoned the working class. He posed a direct question to his audience: Why did Donald Trump win the support of the majority of American voters? The answer, he said, was that working people no longer believed the Democratic Party represented them. This was not unique to America. Social democratic parties across the world were facing the same crisis. If they continued to defend a status quo that was destroying workers' lives, they would not survive. The choice was stark: adapt to represent working people again, or become irrelevant.

The senator's prescription was equally clear. Working people globally needed to develop what he called class consciousness—an understanding that technology must be harnessed to benefit workers, not just enrich billionaires. He reframed economic security as a human right. People deserved proper healthcare, decent housing, quality education, and adequate income. These were not utopian dreams from the nineteenth century; the wealth and technology existed to provide them now. But achieving this required the working class to stand together, to say enough to the oligarchs, and to seize the power to build a society that worked for everyone, not just the few.

During his time in Ireland, Sanders also visited County Kildare with his wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, an activist and political strategist. Jane has ancestral roots in Athy, and the couple attended the unveiling of a plaque at St Michael's Cemetery commemorating the nineteenth-century anti-war folk song "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye." The song tells of a woman meeting her former lover on the road to Athy, returning from war gravely wounded. The plaque was part of the Made Of Athy Project, a local initiative recognizing people with ties to the town who have contributed significantly to world culture. The visit connected Sanders's family history to Ireland while he was there delivering his broader message about power, democracy, and the future of work.