The British general election on December 12 will be held almost 101 years to the day since the 1918 general election in Ireland. The last time there was a democratic vote throughout the island on the same day, the outcome was a decisive victory for Sinn Féin which stood on the platform of Irish independence […]
The issue of the genital mutilation of young girls in non-European cultures is rightly considered to be a key human rights issue that needs to be addressed. It has become a massive problem within European states, including Ireland, due to the arrival of large numbers of people from those cultures. It also, as we shall […]
There is a little known but brilliant book, The Death of Uncle Joe, by Alison Macleod who worked for the British Communist Daily Worker in the 1940s and 1950s until eventually seeing sense and leaving. The book is well worth reading for its human insight into how many people doggedly stuck to their illusions despite […]
Liam O’Flaherty is occasionally cited by Irish socialists as one of their own. His early membership of the Communist Party of Ireland, (he was editor of its newspaper Workers’ Republic for a time), and participation in the comic opera occupation of the Rotunda “soviet” in 1922 are given as support for this false iconography. The […]
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR In recent years, politics and society have rapidly, and dramatically, changed. Views that were mainstream a decade ago on subjects like marriage, trade, abortion, religion, and criminal justice now find themselves increasingly held by only a minority in society. In the UK, Arthur Scargill, the scourge of Margaret Thatcher, is […]
The Polish general election held this month saw the Law and Justice (PiS) party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski retain its majority in the Sejm. It took 235 of the 460 seats, on a 43.6% vote share, up 6% since 2015. The newly formed The Left or Lewica, which is supported by the despised Communist Party, […]
The ongoing protests in Hong Kong and the horrific treatment of mostly Muslim ethnic minorities have focused attention once again on the totalitarian monster that is the Peoples Republic of China. It is estimated that there are around one million Uyghurs held in labour camps where indoctrination, torture and murder are the order of the […]
Anyone who has been following the reaction to the Turkish military offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria will be aware of the considerable and unusual criticism of President Trump by American conservatives. At first sight it seemed that the Kurds and their allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces had indeed been left out to […]
The left’s embrace of climate change as a central part of its platform is in some ways a curious marriage. There has always been a pastoral rural element on the left which was suspicious of growth, but that tended to be either anarchist or agrarian populist in nature. The Marxist oriented or originated left has […]
Monday sees the beginning of a week in which Extinction Rebellion is threatening to close down parts of Dublin city centre. If successful, it will lead to great inconvenience for people travelling to work, school, hospital, the pub, or whatever else they may wish to do on whatever particular day these narcissists choose to impose […]
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. George Orwell, 1984 The recommendation of the National Council for Curriculum Assessment that the teaching of history remain an optional subject for the Junior Cert hardly came as a surprise. Anyone who read the 2016 NCCA background […]
1971 was a key year in the struggle by the Catholic nationalist population of the North of Ireland for democratic rights. A moderate campaign for basic democratic provisions had begun in the early 1960s and grew to be a mass movement led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (founded in 1967). It had provoked […]