Dublin

Pride 2025: Corporations will not sponsor Queer liberation

Trans pride in Dublin

By Yash Sinojia, Socialist Party Ireland. 9 June 2025 The news hit like a gut punch: Indeed, the global job-search giant withdrew its sponsorship from Dublin Pride. Their hollow justification? A desire to “focus on internal diversity and inclusion efforts.” This corporate cowardice isn’t isolated – it’s the predictable collapse of rainbow capitalism under the pressure of Trump’s fascistic regime. Three quarters of Prides in the UK have seen a decline in corporate sponsors, with one quarter of organisers seeing corporate sponsors decline by 50% or more.  Across the Atlantic, the retreat is even more staggering: Target, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, Mastercard, Pepsi, Walmart, and over 20 other major corporations have slashed Pride sponsorships this year.  The timing is deliberate – corporations signal compliance with authoritarian agendas while abandoning the communities they commodified for decades. In Ireland, this manifests as corporate cowardice disguised as fiscal prudence, leaving Pride organisers scrambling for resources as Dublin’s celebration faces a €50,000 shortfall after Indeed’s withdrawal.  Yet this moment lays bare the fundamental contradiction of rainbow capitalism: corporations seek profit from queer communities while funding far-right politicians who criminalise our existence. Capitalism’s LGBTQ+ “allyship” vanishes when confronted with reactionary backlash, exposing how homophobia and transphobia are in its DNA. The corporate exodus proves their allegiance was never to liberation, but to market calculations. Consider the hypocrisy: This betrayal isn’t just ideological – it has material consequences. Pride budgets fund critical year-round programs: gender-affirming closets, holiday meals for LGBTQ+ elders, security against neo-Nazi threats. When Target’s support vanished, Twin Cities Pride lost resources for its Rainbow Feast, feeding 300 people. Corporations starve these lifelines to appease the fascistic far-right. Why corporations have no place in Pride All corporations must be barred from Pride not merely for their hypocrisy but because their presence embodies capitalism’s fundamental contradiction with queer liberation. Capitalism relies on the nuclear family – a heteropatriarchal unit ensuring unpaid reproductive labour and generational transfer of private property – making queer existence inherently antagonistic to its logic. When corporations drape logos in rainbows during Pride month while exploiting LGBTQ+ workers through poverty wages and union-busting, they perform “pinkwashing”: using queer symbolism to mask how their profit model depends on oppression. This exploitation extends globally, as banks like HSBC and Barclays march in London Pride while investing in US puppet regimes where LGBTQ+ people face execution – proving their “allyship” serves imperialist capital, not liberation.  Big Tech corporations are actively complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, deploying technologies like Google’s Project Nimbus, Microsoft’s Azure and Open AI, Amazon’s AWS, Palantir’s Quiver, etc that automate genocide and apartheid. Their participation in Pride sanitises a business model that treats Palestinian lives – including queer and trans people – as disposable testing grounds for “battle-proven” technologies later sold to authoritarian regimes worldwide. There is no solidarity in genocide profiteering. As Israel’s weapons exports boom – fueled by AI systems refined through Gaza’s destruction – these corporations exemplify how capital commodifies both queer joy and Palestinian blood. Corporate participation also sanitises Pride’s revolutionary origins, transforming a riot against police brutality into a “marketing opportunity”, thereby neutralising its threat to systems that criminalise queer bodies. Ultimately, allowing corporations to march signals complicity in commodifying queer resistance, turning communities facing “disproportionate homelessness and suicide rates” into target demographics rather than comrades in collective struggle. Reclaiming Pride’s radical roots This moment, however, is not a defeat. It’s an unmasking. The Stonewall uprising of 1969 – where Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson and Latina trans activist Sylvia Rivera led collective resistance against police brutality – wasn’t an isolated event but the culmination of decades of militant queer struggle against systemic oppression under capitalism.  It erupted in a context where homosexuality was criminalised, trans people were targeted for “cross-dressing,” and bars like Stonewall served as rare sanctuaries amid constant police raids. Johnson and Rivera extended this revolutionary praxis beyond Stonewall by co-founding STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970, providing shelter for homeless trans youth and sex workers while centering the needs of queer people of color – all while organising with the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and anti-war movements in explicitly intersectional solidarity. The subsequent Gay Liberation Front explicitly linked queer liberation to global anti-imperialist struggles, drawing inspiration from Vietnam and Algeria, demanding worker control over means of production, and condemning racism, militarism, and patriarchy as intertwined systems requiring revolutionary dismantling. The crumbling façade of corporate allyship reveals the path back to Pride’s revolutionary essence: community autonomy. This was the missing ingredient after Liverpool Pride rightfully cut ties with Barclays, without replacing it with community involvement and support, ultimately leading to the event being cancelled. Elsewhere, when corporations fled, working class queers filled the gaps. Amid this collapse of corporate support, Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin has built something extraordinary: a thriving, grassroots Pride entirely sustained by community power. Their 2025 campaign has raised around €10,800 from thousands of small donors, accepting no money from any corporation. This isn’t merely a funding tactic; it’s a political manifesto embodied in anti-capitalism, queer, and Palestinian liberation. Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin consciously points to the root cause of the oppression of trans and all LGBTQ+ people – the capitalist system. Only a socialist fightback uniting the struggles of all the exploited and oppressed can overthrow this system which promulgates transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and economic exploitation.  To build liberated Prides, we must:

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BIMM Dublin: A cultural and educational crisis driven by capitalist greed

Concert at BIMM in Dublin

By Kate Quinlan, BIMM graduate, class of 2024, 14 February 2025 The proposed mass redundancies at BIMM Dublin, one of Ireland’s most prestigious music colleges, represent not just an attack on workers’ rights but the potential for a grave cultural loss. Lecturers at the institution, many of whom are accomplished musicians who have contributed to shaping Ireland’s music industry, now find their livelihoods under threat. With outrageous plans to cut approximately one-third of the workforce with lecturers being told they have to all reapply for their jobs, this decision risks irreparable damage to Ireland’s artistic heritage in the name of profit. BIMM is home to some of the brightest talents in Irish music. Its graduates include acclaimed bands like Fontaines D.C., and singer-songwriter Erica Cody. These successes, however, did not emerge in isolation. They were nurtured by the dedication and expertise of BIMM’s lecturers—working artists who have performed with iconic Irish groups such as The Frames, The Stunning, Villagers, and The Coronas. These are not merely educators; they are mentors with unparalleled experience, offering students a bridge between academic theory and the realities of the music industry. “Uber-isation” Despite this, BIMM’s management, now under private equity ownership, has reduced its teaching staff to disposable commodities. By forcing lecturers to reapply for their positions amidst a chaotic “consultation” process, management is imposing a new employment structure that could cut pay nearly in half. As Robert McNamara of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) aptly described it, this represents the “Uber-isation” of lecturers—stripping educators of stability, dignity, and fair pay in favour of exploitative precarity. Management claims this restructuring will create a “stable environment” for students and staff. But how can such claims hold weight when the very mentors who inspire and guide students face uncertainty and demoralisation? As McNamara put it when speaking to the Irish Independent, “The lecturers’ working environment is the students’ learning environment.” Undermining staff not only affects their livelihoods but directly diminishes the quality of education and mentorship available to students. Art and education, not profit At its core, these cuts are a symptom of the negatives of privatised education. BIMM, originally founded as an institution for modern music education, has been reduced to a profit-driven entity since its acquisition by Intermediate Capital Group in 2020. This private equity firm—like others of its kind—exists to extract wealth, not to foster cultural or educational value. For them, the lecturers and their students are merely numbers on a balance sheet. The arts cannot and should not be quantified in this way.  Ireland’s music industry is a cornerstone of its cultural identity and international reputation. The decision to gut BIMM’s teaching staff in such a cavalier manner sends a chilling message: the arts and the people who sustain them are expendable in the pursuit of cost-cutting measures. These lecturers, with their wealth of industry knowledge, have not only guided students toward success but have also contributed to the vibrancy of Ireland’s cultural scene. Their insights are indispensable, offering students lessons that textbooks cannot. If these cuts proceed, the consequences will ripple beyond BIMM’s walls. Ireland risks losing an essential incubator for musical talent, depriving future generations of the opportunity to learn from the very individuals who have shaped the industry they aspire to enter. What’s more, the exclusion of the IFUT from this process is a blatant disregard for workers’ rights. The refusal to engage with union representatives speaks to a disdain for the collective voice of workers. All workers and students must support the IFUT lecturers. Every single job must be maintained without attacks on wages or conditions. BIMM should be brought back into the public system if the union-busting management cannot guarantee this. This is not just a fight for fair wages or secure contracts—it is a fight for Ireland’s cultural future. BIMM’s lecturers are more than employees. They are custodians of an industry that has given Ireland a global platform, a source of pride, and an enduring legacy. Their knowledge, artistry, and mentorship are invaluable, and their contributions cannot simply be replaced by a “restructured” model designed to cut costs. This must be a call to the wider public to recognize that when private interests strip resources from the arts, society as a whole pays the price. The Irish government, too, must intervene and uphold its responsibility to safeguard workers and cultural institutions.  This situation is a stark reminder of the dangers posed by the corporatisation of education. It is not too late for BIMM’s management to reverse course and engage meaningfully with its staff, their union, and the wider community. Ireland’s music industry and cultural heritage depend on it. To lose these lecturers is to lose part of what makes Ireland’s arts scene so unique, so vibrant, and so profoundly impactful on the world stage. We cannot allow that to happen.

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