Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Over the past two months we’ve been reminded constantly about the supposed health of our economy. Unfortunately, things are not as healthy as cherry-picked statistics might suggest—as anybody looking for a hospital bed or a home can clearly see. We’re highly vulnerable as a small, open economy to the vagaries […]
The most famous, fabled and fêted Irish filí (poets) are male. The reasons lie clearly in patriarchal class society. All the more reason for us to seek out the female representatives of a skill that in the old Irish days was associated with prophesying or “seeing,” in fact the Irish […]
Comrades have been saddened by the death of Henry Dent, a former secretary of Dublin District CPI. For many years Henry was a frequent and characteristic participant on Dublin marches and demonstrations for every progressive cause. He also staffed Connolly Books in a voluntary capacity from time to time. Henry, […]
Eoin Ó Broin, Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer (Dublin: Merrion Press, 2020). Much like its author, Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on housing, Home is a very nice and pleasant book. However, given the context of an ever-increasing homelessness crisis, it falls short of providing a truly transformative solution to […]
Over the course of the general election campaign it was clear that a general feeling of bewilderment and boredom, in equal measure, was the reaction of many working families to the talking heads pontificating on television and radio in trying to interpret or reinterpret what a political party said or meant to say
On 26 and 27 January, More4tv broadcast a two-part documentary called “Auschwitz Untold: In colour.” In at least one respect the word “untold” is a perfect description of the story of the liberation of Auschwitz as far as the role of the Soviet army is concerned. The documentary ended with […]
THE TRADE UNION Left Forum launched its Workers’ Rights Campaign in Dublin last month. The campaign is centred on the abolition of the Industrial Relations Act (1990) and all anti-union legislation, to be replaced with a Fair Employment Act that would guarantee— 1 the right to union access
ROLL UP! Roll up! On offer today we have for you all your needs, wants, and desires, neatly wrapped in this leaflet, which explains all our plans for you, our most valued citizen! Let all your worries fade away as we promise you, the early risers, the sun, moon, and stars.
THE BRITISH State left the European Union on the 31st of January, after nearly three years of political theatre, manoeuvring, backstabbing, and manipulation. How the ruling class now manage this process will depend very much on what the working class does. Many on the left have adopted a wait-and-see approach, thereby allowing the ruling
THIS IS OUR democracy. It boils down to political parties arguing over semantics on policy without having any real substantive choice on policies. I see, hear and read about the hopes of many people for a political change, where many believe that we are on the precipice of a fundamental change in the political landscape, not seen since the days of the Irish Revolution.
FROM TIME to time a seemingly minor event illuminates the nature of governance in a country. Such a moment occurred last month when the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, was honoured in Dublin. There may have been a degree of electioneering on Varadkar’s part when he presented the IDA’s inaugural “special recognition award” to Cook. Nevertheless he echoed a long-held view among Ireland’s ruling business class.
THE ESTABLISHMENT keep repeating the mantra that in twenty years’ time there will be far fewer people working than there are now, and more people in retirement. This has now become the accepted narrative of the mainstream media. And it is lie.
FINGAL COUNTY Council, in association with the Residential Tenancies Board, is now offering training courses to help deal with the desperate housing crisis in the Dublin region, now virtually out of control. The courses, however, are not for tenants but for landlords.
THE WORKING CLASS is already dvided by capitalism. If we are to build a revolutionary movement we, as communists, must unite those divisions, not further deepen them. To do so we need to combat the tendencies of tailism and economism in our own ranks. The ruling class utilise a range of tactics designed to weaken the working class, but none of these is more….
THE RISE of the right wing, of fascist ideology, is inextricably linked with the crises of capitalism, which are periodic and inevitable because of the internal contradictions within the capitalist system, which can never be overcome, because capitalism is an antagonistic class-based system in which differing class interests cannot be reconciled.
As we celebrate the sixty-first anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, a great Irish friend, loyal defender of Cuba, asked me to write for Socialist Voice about the imprint of Fidel
Castro and Ernesto Guevara on the most important event of the twentieth century in Latin America—not without first clarifying for me, with the typical frankness and the
classic and imperative Irish style: it had to be brief.