“Cogadh ar Mhná” [war on women], a documentary that TG4 broadcast at 9:30 p.m. on 23 September, describes how sexual violence was used against women during the War of Independence and the following Civil War. More heartbreaking are the words of the women themselves, women who often didn’t have the […]
Month: October 2020
Biggest Nazi Trial Since Nuremberg
first published in Morning Star The biggest trial of fascist criminality since Nuremberg has resulted in the resounding conviction of Greek neonazi party Golden Dawn as a criminal organisation. The roars of approval at the guilty verdicts from about 10,000 protesters on Alexandras Avenue outside the main court complex in […]
Communist youth movement in action
Members of the Democratic Youth Federation of India in the state of Kerala raised €1.2 million by running a recycling campaign in which they collected scrap from around the state and sold it for recycling. Ever since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, left-wing youth organisations around the world have […]
A changing of the guard?
Admittedly we can only ever be certain of death and taxes. With that caution in mind, though, it’s safe to say there is abundant evidence that the once all-powerful Fianna Fáil is sitting on the edge of a political precipice. Over the past decade, its share of the vote at […]
The possibility of a perfect storm grows
The economic crisis facing the Government continues to grow. While economic data paints a much rosier picture of the economy, thanks to the dominance of foreign direct investment (i.e. transnational corporations), the pandemic is having a wider and more lasting impact on the domestic economy, in particular on small and […]
The last of Liam O’Flaherty’s banned novels to see the light
■ Liam O’Flaherty, The Martyr, Nuascéalta, 2020 With this sensational republication of The Martyr, Nuascéalta completes its epic task of restoring the remaining three major O’Flaherty novels banned by the Irish state. The other two novels reprinted were the first book to be banned under the Censorship of Publications Act […]
Communist lives
■ Francis Devine and Patrick Smylie (editors), Left Lives in Twentieth-Century Ireland, vol. 3: Communist Lives, Dublin: Umiskin Press, 2020. The Communist Party of Ireland will celebrate a hundred years of Irish communism in 2021. This book is a welcome contribution to the centenary of the party. After the counter-revolutions […]
The United States Strengthens Its Campaign Against Cuba’s International Medical Cooperation
Declaration by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba Havana, 30 September 2020 The Cuban people and the international community are aware of the dishonest campaign that the government of the United States has launched since 2019 to discredit Cuba’s international medical cooperation; exert pressure on the governments that have […]
Who said that?
“The earth is not dying, it’s being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”—Utah Phillips, folk singer “The US has bombed no less than thirty countries since the end of World War II, killing millions of people, maiming tens of millions more, disrupting and destroying education, […]
Understanding the crisis – and preparing for what is yet to come
The CPI, in conjunction with Socialist Voice, streamed two talks in September under the title “Economics for Workers.” The guest speaker on each occasion was a leading Marxist economist. The thread that linked the interviews by Graham Harrington of the CPI was an attempt to understand the current crisis (or […]
Strengthen our fight for our rights!
Statement by the World Federation of Trade Unions The World Federation of Trade Unions, the world’s class-oriented, progressive trade union movement, considers the achievements of technology to be very important and positive, given that they are used to improve and facilitate the lives of workers and peoples, such as modern […]
The state and the unions
Covid-19 did not cause the lack of workers’ rights in Ireland, but it most certainly exposed them. The dispute at Debenham’s reveals the lack of workers’ rights, and the lack of actual experience among workers of disputes, struggle, organising and tactics as a result of the decline in union membership […]