Month: August 2019

Flag of Venezuela illustrated on geographic map of Venezuela
International

Veiniséala ag seasamh an fhóid

Is mó seans go mbeidh ar Veiniséala idir­ghabháil mhíleata a fhulaingt má theipeann ar chomh­chainteanna Osló, mar a thugtar orthu. B’in a bhí le tuiscint ó chuntas a thug ambasadóir Veiniséala, Rocio Maneiro, do chruinniú de lucht tacaíochta a d’eagraigh Líonra Veiniséala na hÉireann i Halla na Saoirse an mhí seo caite.

Socialism

Kill capitalism—not animals

It’s over a hundred years since Upton Sinclair wrote his ground-breaking novel The Jungle (1906). It catapulted him to fame and set a fire under President Theodore Roosevelt to introduce food safety regulations, in response to which Sinclair worried that his original message had been missed. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he famously remarked, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Current Affairs History Ireland

Féile na bhFlaitheartach, 2019

Tom O’Flaherty, who helped to organise trade unions in the United States in the 1930s and became an accomplished writer in both English and Irish, will be honoured at Féile na bhFlaitheartach, which takes place on Árainn on the weekend of 24 and 25 August. The festival, now in its seventh year, celebrates the writings and work of Liam and Tom O’Flaherty.

Current Affairs

Ye are many—they are few Percy Bysshe Shelley and the struggle against tyranny

On 16 August 1819 tens of thousands of working men and women demonstrated at a place known as St Peter’s Field in Manchester, demanding reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The yeomanry and then hussars were ordered to attack, killing eighteen people and injuring more than four hundred. With the recent memory of the Battle of Waterloo, this slaughter went down in history as Peterloo. Shelley reacted with one of the earliest works of socialist literature, his famous ballad “The Mask of Anarchy.” This month we mark the 200th anniversary of those events and of Shelley’s great poem.