The announcement on Sunday 18 April 2021 by a group of twelve “elite” football clubs in England, Spain and Italy—Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Juventus, Inter Milan and AC Milan—that they intend to set up a European Super League brought widespread […]
Month: May 2021
Repression in the Philippines
■ Michala Lafferty works for UNI Global Union and is based in Nyon in Switzerland. She heads a team fighting for the unionising of the contact-centre sector in the Philippines, which employs more than a million people. Here she recounts some of her team’s experiences over the past year. Mother, […]
Mass solidarity against internment
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Anti-Internment League, founded in London after the introduction of internment in the North of Ireland in 1971. The League, which brought together Irish and British left-wing campaigners, had two core demands: the immediate release of all internees, and the immediate withdrawal of […]
Evictions: The brutal reality of government captured by landlords
The moratorium on evictions was lifted on 23 April, placing the fate of thousands of renters affected by this pandemic firmly back into the hands of landlords. The government has clearly shown that it cares more for the rights of the propertied classes during an economic and public health crisis […]
Austerity: A euphemism for class war
There is a saying, “Life is an education of a different kind, where exams come before the lessons.” The nineteenth-century cholera outbreak taught England the importance of underground drainage systems. Covid-19 has taught us many lessons; one among them is that there are some sectors that have to be the […]
The great housing robbery
The mantra “You need to own your own house” or to “get on the property ladder” has great appeal in the Irish psyche. Young couples will queue outside building sites for days to get their “dream home.” While they wait, and it makes the evening news, the original price of […]
Who said that?
“That’s not the case. Most of the apples are fully rotten. And so is the mainstream reporting.”—Eva Bartlett, Canadian journalist and activist commenting on the description of terrorists in the “White Helmets” in Syria as “a few bad apples.” “The real underlying currency of our world is not gold, nor […]
The resignation of Arlene Foster
The resignation of Arlene Foster should come as little surprise. The difficulties for political unionism, and particularly for the DUP, have been mounting for some considerable time. After one hundred years of partition, unionism has finally run out of options, and unionists’ relationship with the British state has been downgraded, […]
The Eircode scandal
In July 2015, after many years of deliberation and (we now know) internal wrangling, the Government finally announced the introduction of a national system of postal codes. Under the brand name Eircode (everything nowadays has to have a brand name, even public services), it gives a unique code to every […]
Constitutional change on the way?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to assess the behaviour of the Dublin government. Is it slavishly following a free-market agenda, indifferent to workers? Is it responding to pressure from abroad? Is it simply incompetent? Or is it the fact that there are elements of all three causes in the wretched performance […]
Lá Idirnáisiúnta an Lucht Oibre
Sean-fhéile thraidisiúnta ar feadh na gcianta ba ea Lá Bealtaine, an chéad lá den samhradh. D’eagraítí deasghnátha éagsúla ar fud thuaisceart na hEorpa le fáilte a chur roimh an ngrian agus roimh theacht na soininne. In Éirinn, lastaí tinte cnámh, mar aithris ar an ngrian (“tine gheal” ba bhrí le […]
A hundred years of division
On 3 May in this, the decade of anniversaries, we reached the hundredth anniversary of the partition of Ireland. Britain partitioned the country to protect its interests—not to protect us from each other but to keep us apart. Divide and conquer, imperialism’s favourite control mechanism, is a device they used […]
CPI Political Statement, April 2021
Following its most recent meeting, the National Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Ireland, is calling upon the trade union movement and progressive forces to demand that the Government break with the failed approach of allowing the EU Commission to control vaccination strategy and instead to obtain additional supplies […]
A century of division, repression, and discrimination
“I recommend people not to employ Roman Catholics, who are 99 per cent disloyal.”—Basil Brooke, minister of agriculture, later prime minister of Northern Ireland May this year is the centenary of the establishment of the Stormont regime and the institutionalising of violent division, mass repression, mainly against the Catholic minority, […]
Activists must be embedded in their communities
So it’s an Irish Socialist Republic or nothing?—where the people of Ireland will eventually own the means of production and distribution of the wealth, an independent, sovereign and socialist Ireland, free from the grip of imperialism. Where are we now with that project and how long will it take to […]
What separates the CPI from the rest?
In the November 2020 issue the article headed “From A to B, and everything in between” outlined the CPI’s transformative strategy. The present article is a short follow-up based on discussions that have come up since the article was published, which I hope will further illuminate the thinking and ideas […]