Unity among workers is essential to progress in our workplaces and society. It underpins all we do as trade unionists, our work is based on building collective power and the greatest threat to that is division.
Over recent years, changes in Irish society, both economically and socially, have seen our country develop from one where workers departed to find opportunities abroad to a state that is now expanding its workforce by inward migration.
This closer alignment to European norms is a reality of the globalised economy.
Such movement of people is nothing new; historically the only unique thing about Ireland was that our population shrunk over recent centuries not increased, as is the case nearly everywhere else, through population growth and immigration.
That the world system continues to be based on gross exploitation and military force, with the added factor of disastrous climate change, increases the movement of people. These are realities, which we have little power over, no matter how much we might oppose them.
Where we should have power is in our workplaces and communities. Discrimination, whether it is by race, gender, sexual orientation, politics or any other ground creates division, this undermines our ability to build collective power. Without the building of such collective power through our trade unions we have more exploitive workplaces as well as poorer less equal societies.
We can agree that the Government has mishandled issues related to refugees and asylum seekers, that our public services continue to be overstretched after decades of mismanagement, that a housing policy based on profit rather than social need is disastrous, and that it is working-class communities who suffer the most from these situations.
But we must also arm ourselves with the knowledge that progressive change can only be brought about through unity; that the spread of discrimination and racism is directly contrary to the interests of all workers in Ireland.
If we are to have progressive change we must effectively counter not only the racists but their ideas and the failures that allow their poisonous views to spread.