Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Priscilla Metscher, Pioneers of Women’s Emancipation in Ireland (Connolly Books, Dublin, 2018) This fascinating study stands out as a commentary on Irish fighters for women’s emancipation, written from a Marxist viewpoint. The author, Priscilla Metscher, examines in turn the ideas and activities of Mary Ann McCracken, Anna Doyle Wheeler, William […]
The author Anna Burns from Belfast has won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman. The chairperson of the judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, described it as “incredibly original,” saying that “none of us has ever read anything like this before.” Burns is the first winner of […]
Paul Stewart, Tommy McKearney, Gearóid Ó Machail, Patricia Campbell, Brian Garvey, Between Sectarianism and Neo-Liberalism: The State of Northern Ireland and the Democratic Deficit (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2018) If, like me, you mourn the loss of intelligent debate among Irish republicans as they descend into the gobbledegook of bourgeois democracy, […]
Robert Tressell’s book The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists is the first important working-class novel in English literature, written between 1906 and 1910 and first published posthumously, and very abridged, in 1914. The working class has championed this novel about their experience and written from their own point-of-view like no other working-class novel […]
One of the tragedies that befell Ireland after its partial independence was that the aspirations for this newly liberated state were almost immediately replaced, as Liam O’Flaherty put it, by the “tyranny of the Irish Church and its associate parasites, the upstart bourgeoisie, the last posthumous child from the wrinkled […]
Michael Ryan, My Life in the IRA: The Border Campaign (Dublin: Mercier Press, 2018) Mick Ryan, a member of the IRA from the age of nineteen, became one of the most active participants in the IRA’s “border campaign,” launched in December 1956 and officially abandoned in February 1962, though its […]