Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Colum McCann, Apeirogon (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) In the context of the recent escalation of violence in the Middle East, and Ireland’s condemnation de facto of Israel’s annexation policy, this book by Colum McCann is worth reading more than ever. Unlike a pentagon, an apeirogon has an infinite number of sides, […]
The Americas are very much the front line in the struggle against US imperialism’s drive for unipolar, planetary dominance. The United States first tested its Monroe Doctrine there—the brazen assumption that the entire continent is America’s “back yard”—and has since sought to export this sense of colonial proprietorship throughout the […]
Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019) With a jokey title like that, an equally jokey subtitle (The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century), and a super-scrupulous attention to his own title (“the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie”), I should have sensed something fishy, but […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
T. S. Elliott wrote in “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” (1934): Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? We have all the knowledge and information about climate change, but the capitalist system doesn’t allow us to act with wisdom. As a […]
Two instructive headlines from the bourgeois financial news web site Business Insider give an indication of how the balance of global wealth has shifted since the covid-19 pandemic began in early 2020. The first: “Billionaires made $3.9 trillion during the pandemic,” informing us that the likes of the Victorian workhouse […]
The CAP talks have stalled. That means no new environmental schemes until the powers that be, the parties to the negotiations, are all in bed with big-money capitalism. The result, of course, will benefit large corporations and factories, not small or medium farmers, meat-factory workers, or all the rural workers. […]