Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Patrick Pearse is an often misunderstood revolutionary leader. He is seen more as a romantic nationalist when compared with James Connolly. Indeed even today some on the left criticise Connolly for making an alliance with Pearse and the Irish Volunteers in 1916. The problem with this simplistic view is that […]
Every so often, history presents us with an amazing affirmation of our humanity, a sense of continuity, the passing on of the torch. This applies supremely to Robert Burns’s song “For A’ That.” Burns was highly regarded in the USSR Robert Burns, born on 25 January 1759, lived in an […]
On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther made public his 95 Theses against the widespread practice of selling indulgences and clerical corruption. He attacked the Church’s claim to be the sole interpreter of the word and intentions of God and defended ordinary human entitlement to God’s grace without Church involvement. The […]
The search for Frank Conroy’s birthplace and family On 13 December 1936 Frank Conroy, a member of the Republican Congress and the Communist Party of Ireland, sailed on the Holyhead ferry, alongside Frank Ryan, determined to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist rebellion. This Spanish Civil War hero died […]
This November, tens of millions of working people around the world will celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, which took place on 7 November 1917 (or 25 October according to the Julian calendar, then used in Russia). To understand how the revolution happened we need to place it in […]
Käthe Kollwitz, whose work is on exhibition for the first time in the National Gallery of Ireland, was one of Germany’s greatest artists and sculptors. She stands tall among anti-war artists and champions of the dispossessed of our time.Kollwitz broke completely with bourgeois aesthetics and made the subjugated, humiliated working […]
The play Jimmy’s Hall, running at the Abbey Theatre, is said to be adapted from Paul Laverty’s film script of the same name, directed by Ken Loach. When the film was first mooted it sent a scurry of excitement around certain sections of the left, and in particular the CPI, […]
The ideas that reflect the objective interests of a class are its ideology. The ruling class in any society imprints its ideology on “mainstream” thinking, as expressed in all the official opinions of the state—in politics, economics, philosophy, art, religion, and so on. As it expresses the interests of the […]