Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
“I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools… I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended.”
— William Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).
This month Connolly Books is delighted to announce the launch of Rosaleen McDonagh’s new book, Unsettled, published by Skein Press, at 6 p.m. on 30 September in Connolly Books, Dublin.
Unsettled, Dr Rosaleen McDonagh’s first book, is a collection of short essays, poems and vignettes from her life as a Traveller and disabled woman. While the topics covered are hard-hitting and include difficult issues, such as the experience of discrimination, ableism, racism, and abuse, the book is also filled with moments of love for her family, of resistance and celebration, often in defiance of a world and society that would sideline her.
There are proud celebrations of her heritage in this work alongside nuanced discussion on the loss of connection or displacement from it. This sense of displacement is one that Rosaleen has had to contend with on multiple fronts, each aspect of her identity coming into conflict with another. She explores, head on, what intersectionality means in a personal way. She is both the sum of all these experiences and identities and so much more; she is not a person to be easily defined, and has no desire to be.
■ Available in Connolly Books and on line at connollybooks.org, priced at €12.95. The book has also been selected for this month’s Kathleen Lynn Book Club.
There was a great discussion recently with representatives of the Protestant/loyalist community about sectarianism and its roots, among other things, and the obvious effects on people and our society. That set me thinking about potential strategies. Socialists and republicans lay the blame for sectarianism at the door of British colonialism […]
Over the past few weeks farmers were given the opportunity to have their say in a full, nationwide consultation process concerning the recent CAP agreement. During this process a few issues cropped up. These were: During the on-line meetings farmers felt that their various questions concerning their future under the […]
The Communist Party of Ireland published a statement on 13 July 2021. It can be read at the party website here.
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland 18 June 2021 The resignation of Edwin Poots as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and the implosion of the DUP, should not come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of understanding of the entrenched anti-democratic nature of unionism and the […]
The Communist Party of Ireland wants to announce, and welcomes, the establishment of a new branch in the Belfast region. The new branch will be called the Greater Belfast Branch. Its officers and branch members have the full support of the NEC and the membership of the CPI. This follows […]
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The Irish Spark Podcast
Work, like inequality, appears to be a permanent feature of human existence into the foreseeable future. Psychologically, humans do not feel well if they are not working. Or so the story goes. And work, as we said earlier, is continually reinforced by the language of power. “An honest day’s work […]
While always having access to the coercive arms of the state, capitalists prefer to adopt less abrasive, more PR-savvy methods when possible. This is where Kelly and the Teneos of this world come in.
Five years after the Brexit referendum, its effects on the relationships between the Irish state, Britain and the European Union continue to evolve. As a direct result of Brexit, the issue of Irish reunification has become “respectable” and is no longer confined to Republicans and the Communist Party. However, others […]
In this seemingly never-ending “Decade of Commemorations,” with such highlights as the recent commemoration of partition (!), some things seem to get forgotten (besides truth and common sense)—things close to home and things far away. Close to home, here in Galway, it won’t be the execution of Commandant Liam Mellows […]
At this year’s Féile an Phobail in Belfast the Irish Chapter of the Network in Defence of Humanity convened a special panel on anti-imperialism and the Americas, which is to be screened on 6 August through the festival’s web site and Youtube channels. The participants in the discussion were the […]
The Communist Party of Ireland published a statement on 13 July 2021. It can be read at the party website here.
Continuing with the analogy established in the preceding article, we can think of the specific structure of capitalism as resting on three pillars: civil society, foreign capital, and domestic capital. If we think through this heuristic model we begin to realise the enormity of the task, but conversely we also […]
In this article I will attempt to explain the new common agricultural policy (CAP) deal that will be implemented in 2023. First I will give a basic description of the CAP agreement: 1. There will be a linear cut of 25 per cent of direct payments. These cuts will be […]
Juvenile and other immature males seem to have a morbid fascination with fascism, or rather with the trappings of fascism: uniforms, flags, marching, and of course shouting and threatening. But they are only trappings. There’s more to fascism than that. In various European countries where “normal” capitalism is collapsing, fascism—the […]
Over the period 2010–19 the expansion in the dairy industry in the 26-Country state, thanks to the quota restrictions being lifted by the business organisation known as the EU, has resulted in an increase in the land area allocated to dairy farming. At the farm gate level the expansion has […]
■ Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (New York: Grove Press, 2020) Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, set in his home town, Glasgow, in the 1980s. Like many working-class writers, Stuart found himself doubting the value of his story. “I used to ask myself, […]
In what other country would there be web sites offering the equivalent of “funny Irish place-names”?—which in fact are not Irish at all but corruptions. And the great majority of these are not even corruptions in the usual linguistic sense—i.e. changes made over time by the usage of people (in […]
As we move out of the period of pandemic, we would all like to establish some form of normality in our lives. But one thing is certain: workers must resist any return to the pre-covid “normal.” That was an economy based on low pay, with precarious employment, precarious shelter, a […]
Fianna Fáil, at 5 per cent, had a record low share of the vote in the recent by-election. The response of their director of elections, Jim O’Callaghan, was, “We must do better on housing.” This is their strategy: lead people to believe that this was a wake-up call, leading to […]
On 11 July the world’s media gleefully reported that there were protests in Cuba. As expected, no context was given, just flippant explanations about shortages leading to “historic unrest.” It is astounding that the media managed to miss the fact that Cuba is in a situation of enduring the effects […]
The dog-whistle calls of “Freedom for Cuba” that reverberated round the world on 11 July, emanating from a mix of forces in Cuba, which were carefully manipulated and crafted by the CIA and US anti-Cuban forces abroad, shed a great deal of light not only on US foreign policy hypocrisy […]
