Venezuela held regional elections on 15 October, electing governors in the twenty-three states. What was reported in the corporate media was that the opposition denounced the results as fraudulent, as did the governments of the United States, France, and Canada. The opposition has cried “fraud” every time it has lost […]
Previous Articles
Reduced VAT rate is a subsidy for hotels
Sometimes things that don’t appear in the budget are more important than those that do. One of these was the retention of the VAT rate of 9 per cent for hotels and catering. This policy, introduced in 2011 to help the catering and hotel industries, costs about €500 million a […]
Sign the Workers’ Charter
I pledge to support, promote and encourage the following principles within my work-place, my union, the trade union movement, and society more generally. I am a trade union activist in favour of— (1) A Trade Union Bill, in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland, to provide for union […]
Varadkar’s ill-considered message
For a politician who spends so much taxpayers’ money on a “Strategic Communications Unit,” Leo Varadkar managed to deliver an extraordinarily ill-considered and dangerous message on his trip to the North last month. In an interview with the BBC he said: “I wouldn’t like us to get to the point […]
A new campaign for public housing
The Campaign for Public Housing was launched in Dublin at the end of October. The CPI is one of a number of socialist organisations, tenants’ associations, community activists and other groups that make up the broad alliance within the campaign. The campaign was launched in Dublin, but it is planned […]
Inventing the future
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams offers a penetrating and timely critique of the failures of the Western left and puts forward an intriguing hypothesis for creating a society where the drudgery of work has been virtually abolished. The basic premise […]
A book for today
September 2017 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital (Capital), the central work of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and the book that most influenced social and political thinking ever since. It has especial relevance today, describing, as it does, the labour relations of a […]
A legacy of struggle for humanity
Käthe Kollwitz, whose work is on exhibition for the first time in the National Gallery of Ireland, was one of Germany’s greatest artists and sculptors. She stands tall among anti-war artists and champions of the dispossessed of our time.Kollwitz broke completely with bourgeois aesthetics and made the subjugated, humiliated working […]
Portuguese communist festival: From strength to strength
The Avante festival is the annual festival of the Portuguese Communist Party and is held every year in the first weekend of September. It is named for the party’s newspaper, Avante! (Forward!). The festival has been running for forty-one years, mostly consecutive, except for 1987, when as a result of […]
The next crisis—when, not if
We cannot ignore the recent election result in Germany. What happens in the most powerful and influential state in Europe west of Russia must interest us all, as inevitably it will have an impact in Ireland and elsewhere. Moreover, while the electoral success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) […]
The Peadar O’Donnell Forum in Belfast
The Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum has held another successful weekend political school, this time in Belfast, from the 22nd to the 24th of September. The weekend opened with a public meeting on “Brexit and the Irish working class.” Brexit has split much of the left and sections of the […]
No united Ireland under imperialism
Can a strategy for a united Ireland within the EU be a realistic goal while maintaining the three core tenets of socialism and republicanism, namely independence, sovereignty, and democracy? Not for the first time in Socialist Voice is it argued that, far from being the saviour and moderniser of the […]
The right to a referendum on water
Fine Gael has reneged on holding a referendum on the ownership and management of our water. This has been done with the collusion of Fianna Fáil and some of the independents—despite their pontifications on how water charges were a “red line” in the deal that was done with Fine Gael […]
Dump the bin charges!
Ever since the privatisation of bin collection, the collectors have been looking at ways to increase their profits. This is what privatisation is about: nothing to do with recycling, efficiency, or the environment; all about maximising profits. It’s called capitalism. The best way to reduce waste is to produce less […]
Some thoughts on the privatisation of Dublin bus routes
On the 10th of August the National Transport Authority announced that Dublin Bus had lost a tenth of its bus routes to a private operator. Go-Ahead, a British company, has secured the tender to take over twenty-four bus routes. The routes in question are suburban orbital, running north and south […]
Repeal the Eighth! A working class perspective
Since the introduction of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution in 1983, pregnant people have been denied reproductive autonomy in Ireland. Despite sustained pressure on the state to abandon this edifice of inequality, successive governments have resisted change. Now the majority of people in Ireland, North and South, favour the […]