Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
The murder of Aisling Murphy on 12 January on a walking trail known as Fiona’s Way (in memory of the missing woman Fiona Pender) was the most recent case of femicide in Ireland. Women can’t feel safe while walking in the dark, have to watch their drinks in bars, and […]
The title of Robert Ballagh’s painting The Thirtieth of January makes clear its connection to Goya’s The Third of May. But of course the visual language is also compelling. While in Goya’s picture the outline of Madrid sets the location of the executions in 1808, in Ballagh’s it is the […]
An Croí Ró-Naofa san India A bilingual tanka (5-7-5-7-7 syllables), in response to a mural in Chennai. The tanka is the oldest form of verse still being cultivated today, stretching back 1,300 years to its beginnings in Japan. an Croí Ró-Naofa ar lasadh i ngach cistin fadó in Éirinn ar […]
The recent RTE series “Crimes and Confessions” raises a number of important issues. The programmes dealt with three miscarriages of justice, suggesting that the wider context for these events lay in the fall-out from the Northern conflict then taking place. This self-serving explanation may please some but is actually dangerously […]
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland
Throughout the West, since the onset of the covid pandemic, extreme right-wing forces have given political leadership and muscle to much of the anti-mask-wearing, anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protests. They do so by trading on a genuine distrust of Big Pharma and on an increasing alienation from bourgeois democracy, which is […]
“The white man’s burden” was a phrase used to justify colonial aggression, which meant it was the duty of the white man to teach civilisation to the world. But what actually happened was unprecedented atrocities, unknown in the history of human civilisation. Now the United States has taken up the […]
Irish republicanism has always had a weak spot when it comes to history. While we can name every battle, every martyr and graveyard in this country’s perennial struggle for sovereignty and independence, we fail to look at the bigger picture and learn the lessons of that history. Much will be […]
Does anybody know what real purpose Seanad Éireann serves? Not only is its membership appointed by a flawed and undemocratic process but its programme is erratic and tendentious and frequently overlooks crucial issues. Little illustrates this better than its agenda last month. While giving prejudicial vent to its hostility towards […]
We are told that public education is free. However, you don’t need to look very far into how the public education system works to see that this simply isn’t true. The public school system, which is supposed to be financed by the tax that working people pay, is filled with […]
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think […]
It’s worth recalling that one of the highlights of the James Connolly Festival of 2016 was the music performed by Bad Sea, which closed the festival with an incredible performance from the lead singer, Ciara Thompson, who lifted the roof with her magical voice. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, or CMAT, the moniker she has adopted, […]
Liam O’Flaherty is one of the foremost Irish fiction-writers of the twentieth century. Like none other, he commented in his work on the early years of the Irish state following its incomplete independence from 1921. Betrayal of the ideals of 1916, betrayal of the ideals of the War of Independence, is the […]
The coronavirus pandemic has proved disastrous for all the nations of the world, and especially for the less-developed ones, which are now facing another serious economic threat: the theft of brains and human resources by developed countries. An article in the New York Times of 24 November 2021 (of six in a […]
For most of the pandemic we have been lulled into acceptance; what would have been unthinkable in the past has now transformed into expected repeated public health strategy. Lockdowns, when introduced, were intended as a time-saving measure to “buy the Government time” to prepare hospitals and health infrastructure. Two years […]