Member digest – September 2025

There’s so much to be proud of. 

Now that summer is over, it’s a good time to take a moment, sit back, and reflect on all we have accomplished — every victory, action, and moment of progress was achieved because we stood together and made it happen. 

With Dr. Ahmed El Mokhallalati, an Irish-born doctor from Palestine, and news outlet the Ditch, we finally lodged our groundbreaking case to stop this government being complicit in genocide by allowing weapons flights through Irish airspace and military-related trade with Israel including parts for F35 fighter jets. [1]

Join the WhatApp channel to get updates on the case:

In Ireland, we are proud of our neutrality. But now, this Government is trying to tear our neutrality apart. By dismantling the Triple Lock, they’re stripping away the safeguard that protects us from being dragged into illegal wars.

Members have been talking to Fianna Fáil politicians, who are wavering, and together we’ve shared renowned peace activist Adi Roche’s message far and wide. Now we’ve helped former peacekeeping soldiers to deliver their powerful open letter to presidential candidate Catherine Connelly.

Uplift members were out and about in Carrigaline, Cork, the hometown of EU Commissioner Michael McGrath, to make sure he knows that his local community wants to put people back in control of their own social media feeds, and for social media corporations to turn off toxic recommender systems by default.

We know that ordinary people can make an impact through deliberate and targeted boycotting of products. [3] Now Uplift members have turned their sights onto Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest company in Israel and funder of the Israeli military. Across towns and villages in Ireland we’ve been telling our pharmacists that we don’t want any Teva medication on our scripts. Get your leaflets to put in your local pharmacy here:

As promised, all proceeds from the sales of Uplift’s ‘Proud Paddystinian’ t-shirts and hoodies have been passed onto charities helping people in Gaza. [4] You can get yours here, and we’ll keep sending any funds raised.

Far too many of us are living on edge, not knowing where we’ll live month to month, year to year. All the while thousands of homes lie empty, unused in every community across Ireland.

That’s why we’ve launched the Empty Homes Register, and hundreds of us have been emailing our local vacant homes officers to tell them where we see an empty house that could be a home for a family. Check it out here.

When Housing Minister James Brown tried to distract us from his disastrous policies that have resulted in record homelessness by blaming immigrants, hundreds of us called his office telling him to focus on real solutions. Solutions like blocking profiteering landlords from buying 79% of our homes, not scrapping public housing developments, or actually protecting renters, not selling them out. [5]

When the minister responsible for social media, Patrick O’Donovan, refused to meet Uplifter members we decided to go to his home patch of Newcastle West to deliver the findings of our Peoples Inquiry on Big Tech Harms. [6]

You can watch the video of what we did here.

Right now, Ireland is barreling towards importing toxic fracked gas into the Shannon LNG project and we know the consequences will be devastating to community health and nature.

Uplift members paid for research to expose the true cost of what this means for us all. When a CEO of a major fossil fuel company said he wouldn’t live near an LNG terminal because it’s so dangerous we jumped into action, demanding that Kerry County Council carry out an inddependent safety review. [7]

Most of us believe that hunting foxes for sport is cruel and Uplifters have worked hard for years to outlaw fox hunting in Ireland. When it looked like a new Bill that would ban fox hunting was about to be thrown out, hundreds of us emailed our local TDs and saved the Bill. Keep an eye on your inbox for the next step in this campaign. [8]

We all have a legal right to object to the creepy, personalised ads Meta shows us. After learning how to write an objection at our Right to Object webinar, so many of us sent demands to Meta to stop using our personal information for ads that Meta shut down their email address entirely. [9] We’re not giving up and we’re now bringing our objections to the Data Protection Commissioner.