Previous Articles

Culture Poetry

Rogha Ghabriel

Sleachta as saothar Ghabriel Rosenstock Extracts from the works of Gabriel Rosenstock Zuckerberg Zuckerberg Zuckerberg! Sliabh siúcra. An ordaíonn do shloinne dhuit an tseirbhe a fholú orainn? Ní searbh a bhí na déagóirí sin sular tháinís-se, tú féin is do chomlachtsa, Instagram, a d’fhág suaite faoina gcolainn féin iad. Mark, […]

Ecology

Nuclear energy is not “clean”

The leaders of the world gathered their propaganda machine last month to discuss what lies to tell the working class about how they will combat climate change. Britain was among those at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (nicknamed COP26) in October and November. With a history […]

International

Brexit: The failure of unionism

Another year has passed, and Brexit, like the pandemic, appears to be with us for ever. The Government, in the person of the minister for foreign affairs, Simon Coveney, continues to speak and act as if the Southern establishment have real or significant influence in the negotiations between the European […]

Books Culture

How should we read Sally Rooney?

Sally Rooney’s hotly anticipated latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, frames a taut interpersonal drama of interlinked friendships and romance against the wider context of history, class, and labour, exploring the inherent ridiculousness of millennial existence in an increasingly fraught, complicated world. Rooney’s self-avowed Marxist credentials are apparent in this most […]

Books Culture

Working-class voices

The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices, edited by Paul McVeigh, 2021 (€12.50 / £8.75) Working-class writing is coming to the fore in Ireland. The 32 follows the publication of two anthologies of working people’s writing, The Children of the Nation (Culture Matters, 2019) and From the Plough to the Stars (Culture Matters, 2020). All three […]

Imperialism International

Political exploitation of Indigenous communities

Nicaragua is a country with some 40,000 Indigenous families, who benefit from the region’s most ambitious system of decentralised Indigenous government. Three hundred Indigenous communities legally own approximately a third of Nicaragua’s national territory. Within four years of returning to power in January 2007, President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government had granted Nicaragua’s […]

Trade Unionism

Workers Demand their Rights

The Trade Union Left Forum has been campaigning for the last four years to have the restrictions on workers’ rights contained in the Industrial Relations Act (1990) abolished. At the biennial delegate conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in October this campaign took a step closer to achieving […]

Culture Music

Respect yourself

Respect (2021) is a biographical musical drama about the life of the African-American singer and civil rights campaigner Aretha Franklin, which features Jennifer Hudson. “Respect,” Aretha’s signature song, was released in April 1967 and reached number 1 in the music charts and was later hailed as a civil rights and feminist […]