Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
The Sunday Times in its editorial of 17 March declared that “St Patrick’s Day is fast becoming the springtime equivalent of Halloween: a low-key Irish holy day that has been exported, processed, repackaged, repurposed and flogged back to us by the Americans.” There is little doubt that this is true. […]
■ Michael Pierse (ed.), A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This is a book to be welcomed. It is the first study of such scope, attempting, as it does, to present and analyse the entire body of Irish working-class literature. It begins with the first writings […]
“The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the best-paid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie.” […]
A plaque to the memory of the Kildare communist Frank Conroy, killed in Spain while fighting with the International Brigades, will be unveiled in June in Kilcullen Heritage Centre, Co. Kildare, by Christy Moore. Frank Conroy was born on 25 February 1914 in Kilcullen and was killed on 28 December […]
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Fidel Castro declared at the time: “Tyranny has been overthrown. The joy is immense. And yet, much remains to be done.” Despite the decades-long blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States, and its long […]
Paul Stewart, Tommy McKearney, Gearóid Ó Machail, Patricia Campbell, Brian Garvey, Between Sectarianism and Neo-Liberalism: The State of Northern Ireland and the Democratic Deficit (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2018) If, like me, you mourn the loss of intelligent debate among Irish republicans as they descend into the gobbledegook of bourgeois democracy, […]
Samantha Power was born in Ireland but was taken to America at a young age by her parents, a doctor and a dentist. She attended Yale University and subsequently became a war journalist. Later she was an adviser to Barack Obama, who appointed her US ambassador to the United Nations […]
Twenty years ago, on 8 October 1998, the communist writer José Saramago became the first Portuguese author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The first fifty years of Saramago’s life were defined by the fascist dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974 and his active resistance against it. […]
On a wet night in February 1912, Winston Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, addressed a cheering crowd of more than seven thousand nationalists gathered in the old Celtic Park football ground in Belfast. He was there to promote the third Government of Ireland Bill (often called the Home Rule […]
Forty-five years ago, on 11 September 1973, the Chilean military, under the command of General Augusto Pinochet and backed by the United States, overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. Allende, who had won the election in September 1970, was faced even before taking office with the enmity […]
Georgi Dimitrov led the Communist International from 1934 to 1943. During that time, he contributed to the Communist understanding of fascism, more so than any other Marxist theorist. Dimitrov outlined the origins and purpose of fascism as well as the strategy the Communist movement had to adopt in order to […]
“The peoples of the world do not want a repetition of the scourge of war.” Psychology has a complicated relationship with the world at large, often seen as something to be a bit wary of. Like nuclear engineering it has the ring of something easily corrupted and dangerous about […]
A very interesting talk on Ireland’s Basque refugees during the Spanish Civil War was given by the political activist Stewart Reddin at the Ubh café in Droichead Nua (Newbridge), Co. Kildare, on Saturday 16 June, as part of June Fest. The café was packed for the talk, with part of […]
The United Irishmen founded the radical press in Ireland. They had three newspapers, aspiring to cover the entire country: the Belfast Northern Star (approximately 600 issues from January 1792 to May 1797), the Dublin Press, and the Cork Harp of Erin. The United Irishmen encompassed in their demand for equality […]
Cover of the first edition, written in German, published in London in 1848. It reads: “Manifesto of the Communist Party | Published February 1848 | Proletarians of all Lands, Unite! | London | Printed in the offices of the Workers’ Educational Association | By J. E. Burghard | 46, Liverpool […]
Next January the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum will mark the centenary of the first Dáil Éireann and the publication of one of modern Ireland’s landmark documents, the Democratic Programme. The forum will celebrate the occasion with a conference in Liberty Hall, Dublin. While it is important that seminal events […]