Author: Jimmy Doran

Article Trade Unionism

Build Workers’ Power 

With the developing narrative around the EU directive on adequate minimum wages, workers should not be duped into believing that the EU is some sort of a benign benefactor for workers’ rights.    The EU directive on adequate minimum wage claims to be an effort to reduce working poverty and inequality […]

Article Culture Music

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington, a prominent figure in music and cultural history, especially in jazz, died fifty years ago on May 24, 1974.  Edward Kennedy Ellington was born into a lower middle-class family in Washington on April 29, 1899. His mother was the daughter of a former slave. Ellington’s childhood was marked […]

Campaigns International

Palestine Exhaustion

There’s been a word on every activist’s lips recently; burnout. For the last 7 months, thousands of people who typically spend their evenings or weekends stopping illegal evictions, tackling environmental collapse, unionising workplaces, undermining the recently empowered far-right and a plethora of political and altruistic endeavours, have added the genocide […]

Art Culture

Women artists against war, part 2 

It is important to distinguish between wars of oppression and liberation wars, between imperialist invasion and resistance to it. Anti-imperialist wars create a different consciousness among the population. In early 1942, the artist Sofia Sergeyevna Uranova (1910-1988) was drafted and remained in her division until the end of the war, […]

Current Affairs Ireland

St Patrick’s Day Subservience 

It is hardly surprising that many progressive people have become increasingly uneasy about the Sinn Féin leadership’s relationship with the British establishment. Party vice president and Stormont First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, was recently pictured in a close embrace with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, while only last May, along with […]

Ireland Letters

Michael Gaughan (1949-74) 

The tricolour that draped Michael Gaughan’s coffin was used for Terence McSwiney’s funeral, contributed by life-long Communist Party member Muriel MacSwiney, widow of Terence MacSwiney.  During the people’s resistance against injustice in the North of Ireland, it was said that ordinary people did extraordinary things. This could be said of […]

History International Ireland

Palestine and Ireland 

The first British military governor of Palestine, Ronald Storrs, wrote that the purpose of the 1917 Balfour Decleration was to create a “loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.” The settler-colony of Israel was created by the same imperialist interests which colonised Ireland and brutalised our people. […]

Current Affairs Ireland Trade Unionism

A Carefully Crafted Story – RTÉ’s Inside Penneys 

Fresh off the back of a year of public-private financial blunders, including revelations of Ryan Tubridy’s secret overpayment, UK-based barter account use, undisclosed free-car deals and a Toy Show Musical money-pit scandal, our public-service broadcaster is back with ‘Inside Penneys’.  During the summer of 2023, Motive Television / RTÉ production […]

Imperialism Ireland

Imperialism for Slow Learners 

When Barack Obama was elected as the first black president of the United States in 2008, there was jubilation and celebration of this “historic event”.  The “We are One” concert was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the incoming President Obama where Pete Seeger and Bruce […]

International

Farmers’ Struggles and Fascism 

Why have the Indian farmers left their farmlands to protest on the streets? And why should it be of concern to workers around the world, including Ireland?  India is a developing country, the majority of the population of which still depends on agriculture. Modi, who promised that advanced technology will […]