Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Work, like inequality, appears to be a permanent feature of human existence into the foreseeable future. Psychologically, humans do not feel well if they are not working. Or so the story goes. And work, as we said earlier, is continually reinforced by the language of power. “An honest day’s work […]
While always having access to the coercive arms of the state, capitalists prefer to adopt less abrasive, more PR-savvy methods when possible. This is where Kelly and the Teneos of this world come in.
In this seemingly never-ending “Decade of Commemorations,” with such highlights as the recent commemoration of partition (!), some things seem to get forgotten (besides truth and common sense)—things close to home and things far away. Close to home, here in Galway, it won’t be the execution of Commandant Liam Mellows […]
Continuing with the analogy established in the preceding article, we can think of the specific structure of capitalism as resting on three pillars: civil society, foreign capital, and domestic capital. If we think through this heuristic model we begin to realise the enormity of the task, but conversely we also […]
■ Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (New York: Grove Press, 2020) Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, set in his home town, Glasgow, in the 1980s. Like many working-class writers, Stuart found himself doubting the value of his story. “I used to ask myself, […]
In what other country would there be web sites offering the equivalent of “funny Irish place-names”?—which in fact are not Irish at all but corruptions. And the great majority of these are not even corruptions in the usual linguistic sense—i.e. changes made over time by the usage of people (in […]
Over the period 2010–19 the expansion in the dairy industry in the 26-Country state, thanks to the quota restrictions being lifted by the business organisation known as the EU, has resulted in an increase in the land area allocated to dairy farming. At the farm gate level the expansion has […]
A house is not just a building made of bricks and concrete: it’s a nest made of dreams and memories. When such a place crumbles in front of one’s eyes it is heartbreaking. Approximately five thousand families have faced the heartbreak because of the mica issue, which caused cracks in […]
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland 18 June 2021 The resignation of Edwin Poots as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and the implosion of the DUP, should not come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of understanding of the entrenched anti-democratic nature of unionism and the […]
Full marks to Leo Varadkar for creativity. When it comes to offering the public something imaginative, he is hard to beat. He has provided us with many servings. Remember his claim during a period of neo-liberal austerity that welfare recipients were damaging the economy? Then there was his insistence that […]
The Irish government, aided and abetted by its British counterpart, has been trying to assist and solve the “crisis in unionism” since the DUP began to self-destruct last month. This is missing the reality of what is happening and ignoring the elephant in the room. The crisis is not in […]
■ This is the text of a paper given by the general secretary of the CPI that formed part of an exchange of views in June 2021, a conversation between left republican activists and Protestant religious leaders to discuss the future of the North of Ireland. First of all I […]
“Why do we work?” seems like an odd question. Sure everyone works, do they not? Or the majority of people do, one way or another. And if you can’t, don’t or won’t work there is every chance you are seen as lazy, a sponger, or worse. But there has to […]
■ Reprinted from People’s News, 27 June 2021 Last month, German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and her French counterpart, Florence Parly, met to discuss the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) programme. This came amid reports that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative government is anxious to have the FCAS programme’s financing […]
It has long been held that states do not have friends, they have interests.¹ With that in mind I read the Defence Forces Review, 2020,² to see how an important part of the Irish state bureaucracy, the officer corps of the Defence Forces and the civil servants within the Department […]
Three important events happened in 1979 that continue to explain the modern struggles in the Middle East: the Islamic revolution (i.e. counter-revolution) in Iran, the siege of Mecca, and the sponsoring of anti-communists in Afghanistan. After the Second World War the Middle East experienced the growth of anti-colonial movements, which […]