Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
To Burn or Not to Burn is a bilingual tanka (5-7-5-7-7 syllables) by Gabriel Rosenstock in response to artwork by Banksy. To Burn or Not to Burn tá sé ag éirí fuarníl mórán fágtha le dóbratach mo thíre?tar éis a bhfuil déanta aiciar mo shonsa ‘is ar son an domhain! […]
Sean O’Casey’s play The Shadow of a Gunman premiered 100 years ago, on April 12, 1923, at the Abbey Theatre. It is set during the War of Independence in a Dublin tenement. Davoren, writer of romantic verse, shares a room with Seumas, a peddler and onetime patriot who has now […]
Living on Rathlin Island, six miles from Ballycastle in North Antrim, Mary Cecil ponders life and chronicles her thoughts in poetic form. “The Rathlin Poet”, as she is known, has penned a great many poems, including anti-war verses: hardly surprising for the daughter of a soldier psychologically scarred during service […]
The annual James Connolly Festival returns for its ninth year, from the 8th – 14th of May 2023. The annual week-long festival sees events in radical arts, culture, and politics take place in The New Theatre, Dublin, and across the city. It is a community-based celebration of music, film, discussion […]
Dublin may not boast quite the same scene as other cities, nor does Ireland in general, but no journey through any urban centre is devoid of the plague of advertising or of the sight of its counterpart, graffiti. Opposing sides of the same coin, they both involve the co-option of […]
Brendan Behan was born after the foundation of the Irish Free State and during the Civil War, on 9 February 1923, into a working-class family of house-painters. Behan’s people sided with the Republicans. One of Behan’s uncles, his mother’s brother Peadar Kearney, wrote “A Soldier’s Song,” and another uncle, P. […]
Siblings by the GDR writer Brigitte Reimann has just been published in an English translation by Penguin in its series of classic international literature. In this novella we have an authentic female voice communicating what it felt like to live in the GDR just before the Berlin Wall was sealed […]
“Gan Teideal” (Untitled) is an Irish-language transcreation of a poem by Marius Mason, who describes himself as a transgender anarchist, environmentalist, and animal-rights prisoner. His activities were reported to the authorities by his husband, and he was sentenced to twenty-two years’ imprisonment. Marius—a father of two—who has worked as a […]
International film awards are by no means a good film guide. And this applies to The Banshees of Inisherin as much as to the rest of them. The story is set in 1923 on an island off the west coast of Ireland (“Inisherin”—Inis Éireann), filmed in fact on Achill island […]
A group of working men assembled in a bar in London but for a different reason: they were in a hurry to put together a programme for their organisation, the Communist League, which consisted mostly of German migrant workers. They delegated Marx and Engels to carry out the task. The […]
Travellers, or Mincéirí, are a minority ethnic group indigenous to Ireland who have a shared language and culture. The biggest blight on “modern” Ireland, without question, is the treatment of the Travelling community. It is a continuing shame on the state and on society more generally. Traditional Traveller occupations, such […]
Since the rise of early capitalism, the working people’s quest for liberation and equality for all—including the right to a life in peace—not only for the evolving bourgeois class, has been on the agenda and frequently been framed in religious terms. Translations of the Bible from Latin into the vernacular […]
“Avatar” in Hindu mythology means reincarnation. A sequel to the film of that name was released internationally on 15 December. The earlier part had mountains as the battlefield between “sky people” and the natives; this time it is the ocean. It is an interesting film at a time when Elon […]
Three bilingual tanka (5-7-5-7-7 syllables) by Gabriel Rosenstock “Kerouac 1” was written in response to a seldom-cited socialist manifesto by Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), novelist and haiku master: “Shorter hours will provide the labourer with a new desire to live, not to be a productive animal, but to have time to […]
In an open letter, 170 British artists reacted angrily to the withdrawal of the European Drama Prize from Caryl Churchill: We are appalled that the Lifetime Achievement Prize awarded to playwright Caryl Churchill for the European Drama Prize 2022 has been rescinded by the jury of the Schauspiel Stuttgart, on […]
Tribute was paid to the life and work of the late comrade and writer Tomás Mac Síomóin at a commemorative event organised by Aontas na Scríbhneoirí in conjunction with the festival IMRAM in the Writers’ Centre, Dublin, last month. The evening was themed “File agus Fear Conspóide / Poet […]