Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Housing policy in both jurisdictions in Ireland has failed the citizens abysmally. One of the sources of communal revolt in the North was the unfair distribution of housing. As only ratepayers and their spouses had a vote in local elections, priority in housing was given to the unionist community, to allow them to control the councils.
The campaign for an all-Ireland public health service, fully funded and free at the point of entry, is gaining momentum around the country. Already three district councils in the North have supported the demand
Ireland’s mental health crisis was already in a bad way before covid; now it’s getting even worse. Covid has not caused the crisis, it has only made it even more serious.
As quarantine conditions worsen, it’s becoming more apparent that isolation and alienation are a serious danger to human beings. Yet alienation is a central component of capitalism as a system.
Even our primate ancestors “worked”; they had “jobs”—not as we know them today but jobs nonetheless. And they “worked” to feed themselves and their offspring, just as we must do today. But of course they worked only to satisfy their needs: there was no working for someone, or being exploited.
Early human farming too was to survive; but then, with improving farming techniques, not only did…
At the end of 2020 the water “futures” of California, the largest state in the United States in population and economy, were floated on Wall Street for the first time, under the banner of Nasdaq Veles California Water Index.1 It was the first flotation of its kind, offering potential investors the opportunity to hedge against the future availability of water in California: in simple terms, to get rich from the scarcity of the most important substance for all human, animal and plant life to survive.
Mel Corry, who died on 13 January, was a lifelong trade unionist, a member of the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum, and a former member of the National Executive Committee of the CPI. A native of Lurgan and former textile worker, from 2008 he was a tutor with Trademark in […]
Modern on-line social media are a continuing large-scale social experiment as much as we want to consider them a norm of modern life.
Whenever the debate on the effects, drawbacks or benefits of on-line social media arises, there is always an attempt to draw analogies with physical social spaces, such as a public square or perhaps the village community centre.
George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Keats achieved the very curious feat of writing a poem of which it may be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined writing a poem instead of a treatise on Capital, he would have written Isabella.” The 200th anniversary of Keats’s death this month is an opportunity to celebrate this revolutionary romantic.
President Joe Biden’s choice of Samantha Power as head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) got the Irish media into a flurry of excitement.
On 25 January, 2021, the 13th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam will open in Hanoi. The Congress takes place in the context of Vietnam’s successes against Covid-19 where Vietnam has seen less than 1.5 thousand cases and 35 deaths (at the time of writing) in a country […]
Dónall Mac Amhlaigh Exiles. Translated by Mícheál Ó hAodha (Parthian, 2020) Awareness of working-class literature is only slowly growing in Ireland. This is not because it has not so far existed – far from it. Working-class people have known and cherished their tradition for a long time, as a source […]
We might see this as amusing, or a bit futuristic. Wrong! It’s here already. Amazon Health, Amazon Pharmacy and Babylon Health, among many others, are testing new “digital medical systems,” where you ask a computer about your health. This, in time, will spell the end of GPs as we know them.
The same systems could be used for cancer consultations or any
One of the defining marks of a colony (or neo-colony) is its adoption of the ideology, and especially the language, of the conqueror.
As I stood outside the GPO selling the Socialist Voice a young teenager asked me: “What is socialism?” I explained that socialism is when capitalism failed with their disaster economics, like what we had in 2010.
“The significance of the public service to the overall wellbeing of the country has never been more evident than during the past 10 months.”—Michael McGrath, minister for public expenditure, 16 December 2020
You don’t need to have an ideological position to recognise that capitalism is rotten to the core. It is a massive lie from start to finish; but, like any lie that is repeated time and time again, the lies become “truth.”
Whether you are in the middle of a supermarket or the middle of a war, you are surrounded by a cushion of lies, designed to both confuse you and comfort you and always aimed to make you believe that you have no power.