Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
This summer, Belfast saw the worst of its colonial legacy, and the best of its working-class resistance. In June, racist pogroms tore through the city while the state stood by. By August, Féile an Phobail offered a different vision: solidarity over division; internationalism over ethnonationalism. At the heart of that […]
A lot has been written and said over the past month about Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Belfast, culture, and partition. While being able to somewhat accurately report on the effects of the Fleadh, the majority of the commentariat struggles with an analysis of historical developments that have brought us […]
The 450th anniversary of Titian’s death on 27 August 1576 offers an opportunity to revisit a Venetian master whose long career coincided with the emergence of early capitalism. His seventy-year creative life spanned almost three-quarters of the sixteenth century, a period of profound social transformation. His art reflects both the […]
My first car was a 1990 Mitsubishi Colt, which I picked up for €500. Although I did not love it at the time, I have recently been reminiscing about it. With comfortable seats, an ergonomic design and a reliable engine, I even remember the smooth motion of the door as […]
In this sprawling epic, Christopher Nolan takes Odysseus, the Trojan War veteran of mythic poetry, and fashions him into the everyday used-up soldier who has survived the imperial misadventure; left living with guilt over foul deeds committed in battle, and the ache of lost and betrayed comrades. Without abandoning its […]
Power BalladBy Tomás Ó BraonáinDir: John Carney (2026) What if you made something, and it was taken from you? What if you had to watch the thing you brought into existence generates enormous profits; none of which made their way back to you? Would it affect your conception of yourself? […]
The dystopian fiction of imperialism, which began with Jack London’s Iron Heel, has returned with a vengeance in the 2020s, increasingly recognised in international literary awards. From Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023 Booker Prize) to Ali Smith’s Gliff (2026 Dublin Literary Award), novelists imagine futures that feel uncomfortably close to the present. Yet where Lynch’s […]
There are now over two thousand entire homes available for short-term rental sa Ghaeltacht, in the very same areas where the Irish language is so threatened and supposed to be protected. And as the likes of Airbnb grow year on year — with an increase of 88% in the number of […]
The Dublin Cuban Film Festival returns for its third year this July, screening at The New Theatre in Temple Bar and supported by the Communist Party of Ireland and the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The festival opens with the Irish premiere of Cuba After Castro (Thursday 23 July, […]
Set against pagan associations of midsummer festivity and disorder, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is usually presented as one of Shakespeare’s most carefree comedies. Yet beneath lies a sharp critique of Athenian society – a world dominated by violence, while the forest outside the city becomes an imaginative alternative. Through this contrast, the […]
Bob Quinn was an Irish television producer who, after falling out with the RTÉ hierarchy in the late 1960s, found himself living the life of an artist in Connemara at a time when it was one of the most economically deprived regions in Europe, with a wife and young child […]
I Mí Lúnasa, Béal Feirste will host Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the world’s largest traditional music festival. It is not the first time the Fleadh has been held in the north – Derry welcomed it in 2013 as part of the ‘UK City of Culture’ circus – but its arrival […]
The annual festival to commemorate the execution of James Connolly on 12th May 1916 will this year feature readings of a short story and a play which have been attributed to the revolutionary socialist and writer and were only discovered in recent years. The short story entitled ‘The Agitator’s Wife’ […]
Baineadh siar asainn ar an séú lá den mhí seo caite nuair a tháinig an scéal go raibh Gabriel Rosenstock ar shlí na fírinne. Over a long period Rosenstock contributed poetry to Socialist Voice, always a new work and always well on time. The poems were usually accompanied by his own […]
Fresh off the printing press, Sinéad Morrissey’s memoir Among Communists, a story of growing up in a household of Communist Party members in Belfast, has drawn significant attention in the Irish media. Morrissey’s acclaim as a poet is one major factor, but the topic and the way the topic is covered […]
At the threshold of the imperialist era, when the Enlightenment’s promises gave way to war, repression, and new forms of domination, contradiction — the irreconcilable tension between hope and terror — became central to art. A new aesthetics of terror emerged — an existential response to an age that shattered […]