Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
■ Jerry Shanahan, Ireland: A Social History (Dublin, 2021) Much left-wing literature in the twenty-first century seems to suggest that history began in 1848 or, at the earliest, in 1789. This unmarxist view tends towards a blinkered understanding of the roots of modern society and the development of capitalism and imperialism. Therefore, […]
Séamus Ó Riain was born into poverty on 2 September 1937 to Katherine Ryan in Dublin. When Katherine married Tom Ryan, Séamus was fostered out to a family called Corbally; unfortunately, he was to end up in Daingean children’s detention centre in Co. Offaly. Daingean treated the children more like […]
As we mark the 150th anniversary of the French proletariat’s heroic first attempt to set up La Commune in Paris, let us examine Bertolt Brecht’s interpretation of this great event in his play The Days of the Commune. The Commune broke out spontaneously on 18 March 1871. War with Germany, hardship, […]
Before the Industrial Revolution, human activity did not create new, global environmental conditions that could translate into a fundamentally different stratigraphic signal. Since then, however, the exploration of coal, oil and gas, in particular, has enabled worldwide industrialisation, construction, and mass transport, producing a wide range of changes that leave […]
The announcement on Sunday 18 April 2021 by a group of twelve “elite” football clubs in England, Spain and Italy—Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Juventus, Inter Milan and AC Milan—that they intend to set up a European Super League brought widespread […]
■ Michala Lafferty works for UNI Global Union and is based in Nyon in Switzerland. She heads a team fighting for the unionising of the contact-centre sector in the Philippines, which employs more than a million people. Here she recounts some of her team’s experiences over the past year. Mother, […]
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Anti-Internment League, founded in London after the introduction of internment in the North of Ireland in 1971. The League, which brought together Irish and British left-wing campaigners, had two core demands: the immediate release of all internees, and the immediate withdrawal of […]
The moratorium on evictions was lifted on 23 April, placing the fate of thousands of renters affected by this pandemic firmly back into the hands of landlords. The government has clearly shown that it cares more for the rights of the propertied classes during an economic and public health crisis […]
There is a saying, “Life is an education of a different kind, where exams come before the lessons.” The nineteenth-century cholera outbreak taught England the importance of underground drainage systems. Covid-19 has taught us many lessons; one among them is that there are some sectors that have to be the […]
The mantra “You need to own your own house” or to “get on the property ladder” has great appeal in the Irish psyche. Young couples will queue outside building sites for days to get their “dream home.” While they wait, and it makes the evening news, the original price of […]
“That’s not the case. Most of the apples are fully rotten. And so is the mainstream reporting.”—Eva Bartlett, Canadian journalist and activist commenting on the description of terrorists in the “White Helmets” in Syria as “a few bad apples.” “The real underlying currency of our world is not gold, nor […]
The resignation of Arlene Foster should come as little surprise. The difficulties for political unionism, and particularly for the DUP, have been mounting for some considerable time. After one hundred years of partition, unionism has finally run out of options, and unionists’ relationship with the British state has been downgraded, […]
In July 2015, after many years of deliberation and (we now know) internal wrangling, the Government finally announced the introduction of a national system of postal codes. Under the brand name Eircode (everything nowadays has to have a brand name, even public services), it gives a unique code to every […]
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to assess the behaviour of the Dublin government. Is it slavishly following a free-market agenda, indifferent to workers? Is it responding to pressure from abroad? Is it simply incompetent? Or is it the fact that there are elements of all three causes in the wretched performance […]
Sean-fhéile thraidisiúnta ar feadh na gcianta ba ea Lá Bealtaine, an chéad lá den samhradh. D’eagraítí deasghnátha éagsúla ar fud thuaisceart na hEorpa le fáilte a chur roimh an ngrian agus roimh theacht na soininne. In Éirinn, lastaí tinte cnámh, mar aithris ar an ngrian (“tine gheal” ba bhrí le […]
On 3 May in this, the decade of anniversaries, we reached the hundredth anniversary of the partition of Ireland. Britain partitioned the country to protect its interests—not to protect us from each other but to keep us apart. Divide and conquer, imperialism’s favourite control mechanism, is a device they used […]