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Socialism

Language is never neutral

Arrival, a recent and popular sci-fi film based on the Ted Chiang novella Story of Your Life, and China Miéville’s perennially popular Embassytown both build on a long tradition of fiction challenging and examining the power of language. These are especially interesting because of their focus on the interaction of […]

Current Affairs

Israeli Apartheid Week, 2019

23 February to 6 March Israeli Apartheid Week is an international series of events that seeks to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid regime and to build support for the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and to help in grass-roots organising for effective solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. […]

Letters

Letter: The Life and Times of James Connolly

On Monday 11 March at 3 p.m. in the Luke Wadding Library in Waterford Institute of Technology, Prof. Anthony Coughlan will relaunch the classic biography of James Connolly by Desmond Greaves. Prof. Coughlan is editor of the newly republished Connolly biography and is Greaves’s literary executor. He wrote the introduction […]

Campaigns Ireland

Build a People’s Dáil

Late in January some three hundred activists from all over Ireland gathered in Liberty Hall, Dublin, to celebrate the centenary of the first Dáil Éireann. The event, organised by the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum, attracted a wide range of forces, including trade union and community activists and women’s and […]

Current Affairs

Bono at Davos

I used to own an Alsatian dog. He was very partial to a dog biscuit called Bonios. When I first heard that Paul Hewson was known as “Bono” I was unable to dissociate him from the dog biscuit. He used to hang around Grafton Street in Dublin with the other […]

International

Venezuela screaming

Robert NavanVenezuela-Ireland Network “Make the economy scream” was Richard Nixon’s instruction to the CIA when the United States decided in 1973 to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Other countries in Latin America have seen democratically elected leaders ousted by the United States or its proxies. […]

Trade Unionism

Towards a new republic

On 1 March 2019 the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (2017) will come into effect. This is to be welcomed; it is a step in the right direction for workers’ rights. We must always be aware that we are up against a formidable enemy in capitalism. The nature of capitalism is […]

Ireland

A century of unfulfilled aspirations

Much has been written and will be written about the establishment of Dáil Éireann in January 1919 and its adoption of the Democratic Programme. That programme offered the people a vision of a better and more just Ireland, presented as a natural progression from the Proclamation of the Irish Republic […]