Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Striking is never an easy option – especially for health and social care workers. The longer management can draw out a strike, the harder it gets to maintain the unity of purpose and public support that has been such a feature of the on-going health and social care strikes in […]
It is often said that to know how things work you need to live that experience. Over the last number of years, be it on my holidays in the occupied Six Counties or listening to friends and family, I have heard so many stories of a system that isn’t working […]
A growing number of trade unions are joining the call for measures to control the increasing numbers being infected by the omicron variant of covid. At the end of March the general secretary of the Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation, Phil Ní Shéaghdha, in a letter to the ICTU, explained […]
We have two health services in Ireland, and both are on the verge of collapse. Since Covid exposed their existing inadequacies, very little capacity has been added to either service in preparation for the next wave. We should have been building and training staff for several new hospitals. In fact […]
If you were to do an online search for “richest countries” you would quickly find lists where Ireland features prominently, by some estimates sometimes as high as the third-richest in the entire world. At the same time you would understand anecdotally, or perhaps personally, the difficulty with which people manage […]
On the 6th of October, at 1 p.m., the #BetterMaternityCare Campaign will be assembling outside Leinster House with the aim of ending the restrictions on birth partners’ access in maternity hospitals. While this campaign and associated groups, such as AIMS, have been raising awareness about the impact of covid-19 restrictions […]
Over the past year the powers that be have succeeded in reducing any and all political debate about the government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic to the single issue of vaccines. In doing so they have pitted workers against one another, in their time-honoured tactic, and distracted attention from the […]
Continuing with the analogy established in the preceding article, we can think of the specific structure of capitalism as resting on three pillars: civil society, foreign capital, and domestic capital. If we think through this heuristic model we begin to realise the enormity of the task, but conversely we also […]
As was reported in Socialist Voice in September 2020, the apparently systematic transfer of acute hospital patients to nursing homes, and the ensuing outbreaks and deaths, constitute a scandal of drastic proportions for the Irish state. The facts surrounding this tragic situation require analysis, while official reports have been criticised for taking […]
The campaign for an all-Ireland public health service, fully funded and free at the point of entry, is gaining momentum around the country. Already three district councils in the North have supported the demand
We might see this as amusing, or a bit futuristic. Wrong! It’s here already. Amazon Health, Amazon Pharmacy and Babylon Health, among many others, are testing new “digital medical systems,” where you ask a computer about your health. This, in time, will spell the end of GPs as we know them.
The same systems could be used for cancer consultations or any
As 2020 comes to an end—a year that many would like to forget— sadly, despite the world pandemic, there is no good will from global capitalism towards the peoples of the global south in their battle against covid-19.
The TRIPS Council of the World Trade Organization, which deals with intellectual property rights, debated a proposal tabled by India and South Africa, supported by Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Kenya,
Covid-19 continues to wreak its ill-effects round the globe. Here in Ireland, as in many capitalist countries, the most vulnerable in society have been hardest hit by the virus. In addition to the scandal of the meat-processing plants in the midlands, which saw the pro-business, anti-worker 26-county government “lock down” […]
Covid-19 did not cause overcrowding in schools, but it has exposed it. Schools are reopening with up to thirty people in a confined space for extended periods. There are almost a million children, teenagers and teachers in four thousand schools. In the two weeks before reopening, more than a hundred […]
This is the second part of a discussion article offering a detailed look at the effects of partition, at the continued role of British imperialism in Ireland and the effect it has had and continues to have on our people. The focus on public health in the Six Counties argues […]
War imagery and rhetoric abound in the media discourse surrounding covid-19, along with the resurgence of the post-“Celtic tiger” crash cry of “we’re all in this together”—all of which paints a picture of a country united and unified in action against the menace of the deadly virus. It is true […]