Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
There is nothing more foreign to Ireland than capitalism. While the primitive Irish communist system was not perfect, the feudal and capitalist systems of production were brought to this country by an English bayonet. The Irish left has struggled to understand this contradiction within Irish capitalism, instead seeing the class […]
There has been a lot surmising of over the recently announced results of the census in the North of Ireland. For the first time since partition, Catholics now outnumber Protestants there. The census found that 42 per cent of people in the North are Catholics, 37 per cent are Protestants, […]
What on earth was going on here last month? To all appearances a supposedly sovereign independent republic immersed itself in sympathy and affection for the British monarchy. Within hours of the announcement of Elizabeth’s death, RTE had a crew broadcasting solemnly from London. The Government fell over backwards in its […]
The recent exhaustive celebrations of Michael Collins’s life were selective and tendentious. There was very little mention of his campaign against Dublin Castle’s G men and British intelligence but heavy emphasis on his role in negotiating the Treaty and founding the Free State. In reality, the centenary events were an […]
The British and Irish media have been singing the praises of Field-Marshal (retired) Henry Wilson, assassinated outside his home in London on 22 June 1922 by two members of the IRA, seemingly on the orders of the IRB (i.e. Michael Collins). Wilson was a former chief of staff of British […]
The housing crisis will not be solved by treating the symptoms. The root cause—the Government’s political strategy of transferring the provision of homes to the private sector—is the problem that has to be tackled if we are to solve this crisis permanently. This requires a sustained national building campaign by […]
Elections cause even the most docile of people to become excited. It really is a circus. But the human reality is that it is deadly serious for those who are trying to survive in life. And this is true in 95 per cent of the world. Worse than that, there […]
As every worker knows, the cost of living is spiralling far beyond pay increases. More and more working families have their backs against the wall, trying to survive. In particular, the cost of energy has been rising for the last eighteen months or more, which has been added to from […]
In the official ideology of the Irish state, the Industrial Development Authority comes in for special praise as one of the main agencies that helped “modernise” the Irish economy—i.e. opened it up to penetration by foreign, mostly American, capital. It has been lauded as a latter-day David that outfought Goliath […]
In the 26 Counties there is a housing crisis, a shamefully inadequate two-tier health service, a decrepit public transport system, and a grave shortage of affordable accommodation for third-level students. As always, the impact of this failure by the state is felt most acutely by working people. It raises the […]
…a profit of €4,193 per worker. Coincidentally, Go-Ahead Bus pay their drivers €4,000 per year less than Dublin Bus pay theirs…
Students of the coup d’état of 1922 will be interested in the following letter, which appeared in the Freeman’s Journal of 5 August 1922 under the headline “Irregulars’ Eager Allies | Policy of the Communist Party of Ireland.” The following excerpts from The Workers’ Republic of 28th July—the “official organ […]
This year marks a century since the foundation of the 26-County state. Difficult as it may be to believe, the powers that be are now preparing to celebrate what they will describe as a successful political entity. There will be no mention of the hundreds of thousands forced into […]
We are living in difficult and dangerous times, with every chance that things may get worse. Global inflation is driving up the cost of living, the impact of which is felt most severely in working-class communities. Against this backdrop of economic hardship there looms the spectre of war in Ukraine […]
This is not the first time the citizens of Ireland have been faced with a housing emergency. Back in the 1930s and 40s it was solved by building public housing—and it can be done again. From the 1930s until the 1950s, 55 per cent of all housing was built by […]
“Is it hard to see death when it is disguised and tricked out in the surface trappings of life?” John Healy, Death of an Irish Town. If most Irish people think of the country’s Irish-speaking regions in Cos. Donegal, Galway and Kerry at all, they largely think of them in […]