Month: September 2019

Ireland Socialism

Awareness of risk is not enough

On 5 August, Bank Holiday Monday, the Government published The National Risk Assessment, 2019: Overview of Strategic Risks. This is a 92-page document that sets out various risks facing Ireland, under five headings. The first such report was produced in 2014. This report was produced after a public consultation. There […]

Political Statements

Saving Harland and Wolff shipyard

Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland9 August 2019 The Communist Party of Ireland expresses its solidarity with the workers at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast and welcomes the action taken by them in defence of their jobs. Harland and Wolff should be nationalised. This could provide tens […]

Ireland

OPINION How I became a republican

I am a Republican, but I haven’t always been. I was born into a Protestant and Unionist family post Good Friday Agreement. Before this I had family in the British Army and the RUC. I believed these people were defending the North from terrorists. I would look around and see […]

Current Affairs History

They shall not pass!

Speech by Eugene McCartan, general secretary, CPI, at the Spanish Anti-Fascist War commemoration, Slieve Foye, Co. Louth, organised by Friends of the International Brigades Once again we gather here on Slieve Foye to pay our respects and to honour the sacrifice of seven local volunteers from this region of Cos. […]

International Ireland

Seize the time

The Brexit storm-clouds are gathering, and the political class in Dublin is in a tizzy. Having placed almost all its emphasis on the mantra of the “hard, militarised border and return to violence,” they will be deprived of any coherent argument when this fails to materialise. The problem for the […]

Culture

Peasant Bruegel

The greatest of the sixteenth-century Dutch realists is without doubt Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Born about 1525, Bruegel died 450 years ago, on 5 September 1569. His lifetime coincides with the struggle of the Netherlands against Spanish domination. At that time it included Belgium, Luxembourg and part of northern France […]

Socialism

How much is health worth under capitalism?

In the United States, uproar has surrounded the rolling back of access to reproductive health, in Britain thousands of women missed breast cancer screenings because of a technical hitch, and in Ireland we are still witnessing the fall-out from the cervical cancer screening debacle—each the result of policies that have reduced women’s health and well-being to secondary concerns of cost management and profit margins.

Current Affairs Trade Unionism

Workers in struggle

Ryanair attempts to break the union In mid-August Ryanair secured a court injunction to prevent its pilots based in Ireland from striking, even after they had followed the normal industrial procedures. The two-day strike had the support of a majority of the pilots directly employed by the company who are […]