Daily Inspiration Quote by James Larkin

There is a hard-edged pragmatism in Larkin’s choice of verb: “kill.” Not soften, not bridge, not “heal.” Kill. For an organizer who lived and died by solidarity, sectarianism wasn’t a regrettable social quirk; it was a weapon pointed straight at the labor movement’s spine. In early 20th-century Ireland, where identity could be sorted by church before it was sorted by class, the quickest way to break a strike or neuter a union was to turn Protestant worker against Catholic worker and let employers watch the fragmentation do the policing for them.

The line also carries a deliberate refusal to flatter either side. “Whether in Catholics or Protestants” functions like an equal-opportunity indictment, stripping the comfort of victimhood or moral superiority. Larkin is signaling that prejudice is not the private property of one community; it’s a habit that spreads wherever power finds it useful. That evenhandedness matters, because a cross-sectarian labor politics can’t be built on winking exceptions. If you excuse “your side’s” bigotry as historically understandable, you’ve already surrendered the shop floor to the logic of the pulpit.

The subtext is strategic as much as moral: sectarian identity is being treated as a management technique. Larkin’s intent is to reframe belonging away from confession and toward collective material interest. It’s a statement from the era when unions weren’t just negotiating wages; they were trying to rewrite the social categories that decided who counted as “us” in the first place.