Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Bus drivers in London went on strike last month against pay cuts that a number of “private bus operators” tried to impose. However, all is not as it seems. The British government has privatised much of the public transport system as they push ahead with their neoliberal agenda. They followed […]
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland 28 February 2021 The scenes in Dublin city centre yesterday [Saturday 27 February] should come as no surprise to anyone. The reactions to the violence of the state were as could be expected, as were the weasel words of condemnation by establishment politicians. […]
Part 1 The Lisbon Treaty is working perfectly. Just as opponents of the EU in Ireland warned after the bloc’s leaders signed the treaty in December 2007, the last vestiges of the Irish state’s neutrality have disappeared over the last decade. The importance of the Lisbon Treaty to the incontrovertible […]
Part 1 In March 2017 the Government recognised Irish Travellers as an ethnic minority. This was the culmination of a long campaign by Traveller activists, and while it was a vast improvement on the attitude behind the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (1963),[1] which saw them as “deviant, destitute […]
Part 2 ■ Part 1 of this article was published in the February issue. What model of human does neoliberalism encourage? Neoliberalism sees Darwinian competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling. It maintains that […]
Consumerism and the military-industrial complex go hand in hand in generating massive profits for global corporations. The military-industrial complex is the guarantor of cheap raw materials and cheap labour so that we in the First World can gorge on a never-ending supply of consumer goods at prices that we could […]
The death of Terence MacSwiney on hunger strike, after seventy-four days, was not the first nor the last of that of Irish martyrs who died because of the intransigence of British imperialism. Originally a tactic used by suffragists, the hunger strike has become synonymous with Irish anti-imperialism, in part thanks […]
■ From the Plough to the Stars: An Anthology of Working People’s Prose from Contemporary Ireland “The cooks, the cleaners, the porters: Unsung heroes on the frontline,” the Irish Times declared in early May 2020, suddenly recognising that a society cannot function without the working class, for just a brief […]
Like few other composers, Beethoven expresses the will for freedom, the democratic longing of the people. His music is the continuation of the French Revolution through the means of art; his Ninth Symphony is a hymn to the humanist utopia of the equality of all humankind. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony The […]