Month: December 2017

Article Campaigns

The right to a decent, secure home

The Campaign for Public Housing is not looking for concessions or for tweaks to the existing housing policy. The state’s housing policy has been designed to fill the pockets of landlords, developers and financiers with rents, subsidies, and tax breaks, as it was designed to do. That strategy is clearly […]

International Socialism

Socialism and a Catalan Republic

The continuing struggle over Catalan independence raises many questions for socialists and the left, especially those in countries, such as Ireland, where the national question still has a prime place in politics. Events in Catalunya show that independence movements are not, as idealists would think, concerned only with such issues […]

History Ireland

Small ripples make big waves

The search for Frank Conroy’s birthplace and family On 13 December 1936 Frank Conroy, a member of the Republican Congress and the Communist Party of Ireland, sailed on the Holyhead ferry, alongside Frank Ryan, determined to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist rebellion. This Spanish Civil War hero died […]

Culture

“When the table came”

Gabriel Rosenstock introduces and translates another poem from the Indian sub-continent, originally written in Konkani, the indigenous language of Goa. We seem to accept “technological progress” and the McDonaldisation of the world as inevitable. Who wants to be called a Luddite? Yet on reading “When the Table Came” one is […]

Trade Unionism

A future worth fighting for

Earlier this month the Trade Union Left Forum issued its “Workers’ Charter: A Future Worth Fighting for.” The charter calls for a range of legislative reforms to improve both workers’ and union rights in the south and north of Ireland. Each progressive change itself is important for workers, but, if […]

Imperialism International

The road to Damascus

In 2007 General Wesley Clarke revealed the Pentagon’s post-9/11 plan to overthrow “seven countries in five years: Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” In the 7 October edition of the Tory Spectator, J. R. Bradley outlined the now failed plot against Syria: “our cynical […]