Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
“Cogadh ar Mhná” [war on women], a documentary that TG4 broadcast at 9:30 p.m. on 23 September, describes how sexual violence was used against women during the War of Independence and the following Civil War. More heartbreaking are the words of the women themselves, women who often didn’t have the […]
Admittedly we can only ever be certain of death and taxes. With that caution in mind, though, it’s safe to say there is abundant evidence that the once all-powerful Fianna Fáil is sitting on the edge of a political precipice. Over the past decade, its share of the vote at […]
Members of the Democratic Youth Federation of India in the state of Kerala raised €1.2 million by running a recycling campaign in which they collected scrap from around the state and sold it for recycling. Ever since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, left-wing youth organisations around the world have […]
first published in Morning Star The biggest trial of fascist criminality since Nuremberg has resulted in the resounding conviction of Greek neonazi party Golden Dawn as a criminal organisation. The roars of approval at the guilty verdicts from about 10,000 protesters on Alexandras Avenue outside the main court complex in […]
The economic crisis facing the Government continues to grow. While economic data paints a much rosier picture of the economy, thanks to the dominance of foreign direct investment (i.e. transnational corporations), the pandemic is having a wider and more lasting impact on the domestic economy, in particular on small and […]
“The earth is not dying, it’s being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”—Utah Phillips, folk singer “The US has bombed no less than thirty countries since the end of World War II, killing millions of people, maiming tens of millions more, disrupting and destroying education, […]
Declaration by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba Havana, 30 September 2020 The Cuban people and the international community are aware of the dishonest campaign that the government of the United States has launched since 2019 to discredit Cuba’s international medical cooperation; exert pressure on the governments that have […]
■ Francis Devine and Patrick Smylie (editors), Left Lives in Twentieth-Century Ireland, vol. 3: Communist Lives, Dublin: Umiskin Press, 2020. The Communist Party of Ireland will celebrate a hundred years of Irish communism in 2021. This book is a welcome contribution to the centenary of the party. After the counter-revolutions […]
■ Liam O’Flaherty, The Martyr, Nuascéalta, 2020 With this sensational republication of The Martyr, Nuascéalta completes its epic task of restoring the remaining three major O’Flaherty novels banned by the Irish state. The other two novels reprinted were the first book to be banned under the Censorship of Publications Act […]
Covid-19 did not cause the lack of workers’ rights in Ireland, but it most certainly exposed them. The dispute at Debenham’s reveals the lack of workers’ rights, and the lack of actual experience among workers of disputes, struggle, organising and tactics as a result of the decline in union membership […]
Statement by the World Federation of Trade Unions The World Federation of Trade Unions, the world’s class-oriented, progressive trade union movement, considers the achievements of technology to be very important and positive, given that they are used to improve and facilitate the lives of workers and peoples, such as modern […]
The CPI, in conjunction with Socialist Voice, streamed two talks in September under the title “Economics for Workers.” The guest speaker on each occasion was a leading Marxist economist. The thread that linked the interviews by Graham Harrington of the CPI was an attempt to understand the current crisis (or […]
Covid-19 continues to wreak its ill-effects round the globe. Here in Ireland, as in many capitalist countries, the most vulnerable in society have been hardest hit by the virus. In addition to the scandal of the meat-processing plants in the midlands, which saw the pro-business, anti-worker 26-county government “lock down” […]
Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century philanthropist, was by any standard a decent sort of bloke. He believed workers should be treated compassionately and that they deserved a reasonable standard of living. In fact he went a step further and attempted to build ideal societies in different countries, including one at Ralahine […]
Capital accumulation is one outcome of the irrational motor that drives our economic system. This is no less true for the agricultural sector than it is for industry. As capitalist production advances over time we witness a greater and greater accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands. Let’s consider […]
In 2019 there were 37,859 applicants on the social housing list in the north of Ireland. 26,387 of those were deemed to be in priority need of housing, described as housing stress; 74 per cent of those were considered officially homeless. These grim statistics are compounded by the fact that […]