Carmel Gates: The 'revolutionary socialist' who won over NI's civil servants talks about her legacy and 'arrogant' and 'clueless' politicians

Carmel Gates, the outgoing General Secretary of the Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance (Nipsa), sat down with the News Letter to look back on her career – and reveal what she really thinks about some of the politicians she’s dealt with.

The Coalisland native makes no secret of her own politics, she’s a committed socialist and a member of Militant Left, a fringe Trotskyist political organisation. Despite that, she’s convinced civil servants, not traditionally a radical bunch, to back her in various roles for decades.

“I’m the first revolutionary socialist general secretary, probably on these islands or anywhere in Europe” she said.

Nipsa’s main headquarters in south Belfast are undergoing a renovation, so the interview took place a few doors down in another grand old building owned by the union.

On the way in I walked over a plaque dedicated to the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, which Carmel later pointed out to me.

I joked that I must’ve missed it as I was too busy looking for a Cuba-Ireland solidarity plaque I’d spotted on a wall during a previous visit to Nipsa HQ.

I have known Carmel in a professional capacity for years, and she has never been someone to miss and hit the wall when criticising my reporting or that of the media generally. But conversations were usually about the issue at hand – normally Nipsa’s view on public sector pay or industrial action.

In my experience, she was never someone for getting into personalities – until now. And some of what she said was quite surprising,

Like most people in Northern Ireland, Carmel Gates did not grow up wealthy. From the small County Tyrone town of Coalisland, she went to university and then into the civil service.

The civil service is an organisation where, you’d imagine, people leave their constitutional politics at the door – Carmel Gates says it was not like that 1980s in Castle Buildings on the outskirts of Belfast.

“People would have had their pens and they would have put tape on it. You would just walk past one desk, and the person had red, white, and blue tape on their pen. And maybe two desks up, someone had green, white, and yellow tape on their pen. So it was how they marked their desks”, she said.

Talking politics was banned, but the young trade unionist didn’t think that included her brand of left-wing politics.

“I thought, well, I'm doing trade union politics, so that's not quite the same. I took over as a branch secretary in one of the biggest branches at the civil service at the time. It was right in the middle of the health service dispute, and the branch secretary crossed the picket line.

“When I saw him driving in. I said, ‘Right, okay, he's gone’. So the next meeting, I said, ‘I can't have someone who broke a strike, who scabbed, being the branch secretary’. So everybody was going, ‘Who's going to do it?’ And then they're going: ‘Well, why don't you do it?’”.

At this point, Ms Gates’s role in the union movement really took off, as she became the branch secretary.

“I am not in one camp or the other, and what I set out to do in that branch was try and heal the division – because there had been a lot of division.

“There was a lot of and the flare-ups on different things. Like when Nipsa made a donation to the UDR Benevolent Fund, and there was all these threats of resignations and people demanding a meeting. And and then the next thing they give a donation to the NCCL (National Council for Civil Liberties) after the shooting in Gibraltar, so the other half of the branch was up in arms”, she said.

“I cut my teeth through really difficult times”, she said. Her answer was cross-community politics, which focused on workers’ rights.

“There was always something outside that was causing a tension with people inside. So then I started by making everybody take the tape off their pens – and take off any visible sign that they were one thing or another”, she said.

In 2024, another County Tyrone woman and union boss, Pat Cullen, stood down as the UK head of the Royal College of Nursing to run as a Sinn Féin Westminster candidate. Carmel Gates won’t be doing that.

“I've always hoped that the trade union movement would build a separate political party. I'm convinced that that the people who vote Sinn Féin or DUP, are sometimes voting for them holding their nose”, she said.

She said she would like to see local trade unions coming together to build a party “that would deal with bread and butter issues”.

“I’m in Militant Left, which is a socialist party. It's not a mainstream party, but I have been deliberately not seen to be aligned to either Sinn Féin or the DUP or any other kind of nationalist party or unionist party – and have particularly in my role as trade union have steered clear of that.

“I've always said I'm a socialist. I'm a revolutionary socialist. I would like to see the overthrow of capitalism, and build an economy that is – it sounds like cliche now – but for the many, not the few, and an equal society”, she said.

Her revolutionary politics has left its mark on Nipsa. As she leaves, the union’s objectives now explicitly include “the development of a democratic socialist economy”. Its goals also now include a commitment to “independent, cross-community, anti-sectarian trade unionism” – another legacy Carmel is proud of.

Something I’ve reported on over the years is a ‘two-tier’ system which operates in public buildings in Northern Ireland, whereby many of the lowest paid staff work for outsourcing companies and not for the civil service – like their better-paid white collar counterparts.

These staff include cleaners, security staff, caterers and porters. I asked if she felt Nipsa had dropped the ball on protecting these workers – and why it was largely these roles which had been outsourced.

She said the issue dated back to the Thatcher era, when compulsory competitive tendering was introduced. “In hindsight, I think the trade union movement should have put up a better fight against it”, she said.

“I wouldn't say Nipsa dropped the ball because I wasn't about enough to know what we did at that point in time. In hindsight, it should have been something that the trade union movement should have put up a bigger fight on”, she added.

Asked about whether Nipsa’s good relationship with the Stormont parties was because it was easy for both to blame the UK government for underfunding – Ms Gates said that’s not what the union does.

Asked about previous secretaries of state, she described Hilary Benn as “quite clueless about this place” – but praised the last Conservative in the job, Chris Heaton-Harris.

“He was personable, he was pleasant, he wasn't arrogant. And and this is something I shouldn't be saying on the record, but I found Chris Heaton-Harris of the last three, to be the most understanding of what this place was.

“The most accepting of what years of austerity has done to the place. And the least arrogant. The one who actually understood why we have some of the difficulties we have.

“When Hilary Benn came in, one of his first words to me when we met to discuss the issues was, ‘well, my constituents in Leeds, they're getting as much money as people in Northern Ireland are getting – and we need to pay water charges. Blah blah blah blah blah.

“I thought is this the attitude that you're coming in here with. this condescending attitude”, she said.

On the current NI secretary Sir Chris Bryant, the Nipsa chief admits she hasn’t met him yet, but from a distance finds him “arrogant and condescending” – adding “I don’t think he understands this place”.