Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
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 […]
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948) emerges from a 20th-century shadow shaped by war, existential uncertainty, and the threat of total annihilation. Echoing Bertolt Brecht’s warning about civilisations vanishing after repeated conflict, the play imagines what remains of humanity after catastrophe. Set on a barren stage — “a country road, a tree, […]
Yet another Frankenstein film has appeared on screens. Despite acclaim, it bears little resemblance to Mary Shelley’s novel. For readers interested in Shelley’s political vision and the historical pressures shaping her work, the 1818 text remains indispensable. To mark the 175th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley’s death, we revisit this […]
Pundits estimate there are somewhere between 50 and 80 million Irish people around the world. Our 17th-century ancestors rebelled against plantation owners in the Caribbean, only to then shape racialist police departments across the USA. We spread the fiddle, the Pope and the craic as far as the Guinness family’s […]
Shivaun O’Casey, Sean O’Casey’s only daughter and now sole surviving child, has published a remarkable memoir. Born in 1939, she grew up in a highly political household: Sean defined himself as a communist for most of his life, and Eileen shared his convictions. Their home was filled with modernist art, […]
Jack London’s journey as a socialist and a writer is a story of dramatic ascent and tragic decline. His socialism grew from lived experience: childhood poverty, hard labour in factories, and firsthand exposure to capitalism’s exploitative logic, crystallised in 1894 during his time as a hobo. On “The Road,” travelling […]
A Monument of Witness and Sumud Leila Majaj Kirkconnell’s novel Under the Same Sky is a profound act of witnessing. It transforms an immense geopolitical catastrophe into an intimate, sensory, fully human experience. Its epigraph, “Gaza Interlude,” evokes sumud – steadfast, everyday resistance expressed through the act of living. One of the novel’s greatest […]
“Tá dualgas ar gach saoránach Gaeilge a labhairt.” [“Every citizen has a duty to speak Irish.”] These words of Máirtín Ó Cadhain, spoken in an earlier era of struggle, are finding new resonance in today’s Ireland. Across the nation, and particularly among the younger generations, a quiet but determined reconquest […]
From the Bog to the Cloud is the bestselling book Ireland needs—a rigorous analysis of the nation’s place in the world and a strategic guide for how to change it through principled, anti-imperialist struggle. Authors Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie dissect an Ireland locked snugly between the competing yet collaborative […]
Liadán Ní Chuinn’s stunning short story collection is a courageous, unflinching diagnosis of an open wound. That wound is the legacy of the conflict in the British-occupied Six Counties. Ní Chuinn’s genius is to move beyond the strictly political to explore its precise, cellular-level damage within the nationalist community—how state […]