Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
It has been revealed by Sinn Féin TD Eoin O’Broin through parliamentary questions that the Department of Housing underspent in excess of €1.5 billion between 2020 and 2022. O’Broin has said that the underspend could have been used to build 40,000 homes. In 2020, €92.7m was underspent; in 2021, €441m […]
The annual, week-long James Connolly Festival returns on 8-14 May 2023. The purpose of the festival has always been the promotion of working class consciousness in arts, culture and politics. By way of achieving its objective, the festival features a number of artists, activists and educators from left and progressive […]
The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA), signed a quarter of a century ago in April 1998, was promoted then and is being celebrated now, as a peace agreement to end the 30-year armed conflict between Irish republicans and the British state assisted by its local militia allies within unionism. Prepare to […]
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! […]
In the March Socialist Voice, a piece on Ukraine proposed the proximate cause of the war is NATO. There are good reasons why Communists in Western European countries should highlight NATO’s role to its own populations insofar as it helps counter one-sided narratives of the conflict. However, some have also […]
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 […]
In 1984 a baby was found dead on a beach at Caherciveen. He was murdered: stabbed 28 times. At that time Gardaí arrested a young woman and got a confession from her for the young baby’s death. It was later proven that the Gardaí forced the confession from this innocent […]
When it comes to money and power, real power, like imperial power, not Micky Mouse or parish-pump “power”, there’s always a deal to be had. Since the partition of Ireland the number of “agreements” that have been engineered and given important sounding names, would fill a thousand large skips with […]
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 Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that he believes the government have now turned the corner on housing. In turning this corner, the government have turned their backs on the housing needs of the citizens of Ireland. A blatant example of this is the latest government scheme which puts Ireland […]
War is a slaughter, a living hell, visited first and foremost against the working class. As Lenin noted, “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends”. War too is invariably orchestrated by members of the ruling class, who are spared the peril of death or physical danger […]
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed last month, causing major turbulence across the world’s financial sector. Within a week of its closure, the Financial Times was reporting that the value of global bank stocks had fallen $460 billion. Fearing meltdown from contagion, state-controlled treasuries across the capitalist order made huge sums […]
Capitalism evolved from the development of trade: mercantile capitalism gave way to manufacturing capitalism which transformed into industrial capitalism after the industrial revolution, which was fueled by scientific inventions. The history of capitalism as a dominant mode of production begins in the 17th century, with Holland and England being the […]
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 […]
(Pádraig Mac Oscair is an author and activist based in Ireland. His writing can also be read in Mionlach, Rupture and Socialist Voice. He can be found on Twitter at @PMacOscair) In recent months, the inner-city Dublin community of East Wall has seen a persistent series of protests against the […]
These past few months, Germany’s Die Linke (“The Left”) party has been struggling with the issue of agreeing on a position regarding the Ukraine war. Die Linke – founded in 2007 after a merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and Labour and Social Justice – through the PDS […]