Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Democracy is a combination of two Greek words, dēmos (people) and kratos (rule). As societies change, some words wither away, some new words come into existence, and some words change meaning. Democracy has a broader meaning today than in ancient Greece. The democracy of the ancient Greeks had its limitations […]
“No ethical consumption under capitalism” is a phrase that is often bandied about with no real connection to its origin. It’s used to provide cover for superfluous hauls and conspicuous consumption (or overconsumption), the line of thinking being that “if no choices are ethical then I can and should be […]
In Ireland the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and more people are falling into poverty every day. The Central Statistics Office is the statistical agency responsible for gathering information relating to economic, social and general activities and conditions. It collects and “analyses” this type of information […]
As we enter 2023, working people are still affected by long-standing problems: shortage of housing, crumbling health service, low wages, precarious work, spiralling rents, and growing inequality. Many of these conditions plague people in the Six Counties, with the added complication caused by British-imposed partition: sectarianism, a built-in unstable political […]
“Buggins’s turn” is a disparaging term meaning appointment to positions by rotation rather than by merit. No Brownie points for identifying Leo “the-classified-file-sharer” Varadkar as the Dáil’s current Mr Buggins. Even the chronically right-wing Fine Gael-supporting Sunday Independent was unable to get excited about him swapping chairs with Micheál Martin. […]
There is a German word, schadenfreude, meaning to take pleasure from another’s misfortunes. Watching the convulsions wracking the British Conservative Party, this writer is surely not alone in experiencing a large degree of that same feeling. Not since the Suez crisis of 1956 has a British government found itself in […]
A major victory for the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland was the removal of public housing from sectarian control through the creation of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. The NIHE built up a reputation for building some of the best public housing in western Europe, and developing progressive engagement […]
Anyone who is politically active knows the importance of reading—and knows the weight of books one ought to have read. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of works to be read and the knowledge to acquire and process, and not only from weighty political tomes. For […]
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 […]
Never miss the opportunities thrown up by a crisis to advance long-held goals! The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided such an opportunity for the Irish establishment and the establishment media to push forward their long-held agenda to ditch Irish neutrality and to use the Ukrainian crisis to push for […]
The ruling class around the world have decided that the global economy must get back to normal, and that restrictions introduced to protect people in the so-called “developed world” from the covid-19 pandemic must be abandoned, despite the onset of a new wave of the virus. Governments have gone back […]
The intention of this article is to bring into focus the idea of “rights” and to put forward the argument that the communist movement should not frame strategies within the language of rights: rather our analysis must be based on class power. If our objective is to develop class-consciousness with […]
Government housing policy is the cause of the housing crisis. Homelessness, waiting-lists and extortionate levels of private rent are the symptoms of policy designed to benefit speculators, landlords, and hedge funds—the business class. The number of homes available to rent has fallen close to a historical record, while rents have […]
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, during the peak of the covid pandemic, said that “we are all in this together.” But, on the contrary, two newspaper articles provide evidence to believe otherwise. The Irish Examiner reported that the wealth of nine Irish billionaires increased by 58 per cent since the […]
Prison abolitionism is often viewed as a utopian idea, but when we examine the root causes of crime, and the victims of the legal system, it’s clear that if abolitionism is utopianism we are living in a dystopia. When a particularly heinous crime is committed it is the typical reaction […]
“More right-wing than Genghis Khan” is an expression often used to describe how far to the right someone is. Whatever about the accuracy of this statement, communists, socialist republicans and the left generally have a particular antipathy to right-wing ideology, and for a myriad of reasons. The first response is […]