The municipal election results in Hong Kong at the weekend, in which the pro democracy anti-Communist candidates took 90% victory of the seats, have been widely acclaimed as a victory for pro-democracy demonstrators seeking to resist further encroachments on their freedoms from Beijing. Many western governments and political leaders have voiced their support and Donald […]
While Marx as the Mystic Meg of the inevitability of socialism has long since lost any credibility outside of the unreconstructed far left, and people who have never actually read him for the most part, he is still an important figure. The first volume of Capital stands as an excellent work of economic history. It […]
November 21 marks the 99th anniversary of one of the most momentous days in modern Irish history. That date in 1920 fell on a Sunday, the first one in this country to be given the sombre appellation Bloody for it was the most violent day in the War of Independence. Thirty two people in all […]
I would not be a huge admirer of former Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins but I will give credit where it is due. When I was working in Leinster House he was the only TD to object to the fawning reception given to a delegation from the Peoples Republic of China. He pointed out that […]
At the 1934 congress of the All Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) up to 300 of the 1,200 delegates cast negative votes for Stalin in the election for the Central Committee. So paranoid and irate was Stalin that he had the offending delegates hunted down and murdered. Indeed, the majority of the delegates lost their lives […]
During a week that saw the closing of two peat stations in Offaly and Longford at the cost of hundreds of jobs affecting many thousands of people and threatening the viability of rural towns and villages, what does RTÉ bestow on us? An entire series of climate porn during which we heard dire predictions of […]
As more than 600,000 people in Dublin, Kildare and Meath face at least another four days without domestic drinking water we can apparently look forward to this becoming a regular occurrence. Apart from illustrating once more the disaster that is Irish Water, it is perhaps a timely forewarning of what is coming down the tracks […]
My parting of the ways with the left, or rather the Marxist-oriented left, was a complex one. It took place during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states, although for a time I deluded myself that something better might emerge, or even that it might be preferable if the regimes survived. […]
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 […]