On 7th December, the National Graves Association unveiled a statue in Finglas commemorating Liam Mellows who was executed on December 8, 1922 by Free State forces. Mellows was born in Lancashire into a British army family. When his father was transferred to Dublin he spent some years with his mother’s family in Wexford. He joined […]
In terms of the arithmetic that governs the balance of power within Leinster House, the results of the four by-elections make little difference. The only way in which the Government can be forced into calling an early election is if Fianna Fáil support a motion of no confidence, and there was little evidence that even […]
The shooting dead of Islamist terrorist Usman Khan, who murdered two people in the London Bridge attack on Friday, has raised a number of issues. The fact that Khan who was convicted in February 2012 of being part of a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange, was free to carry out the attack seems […]
Speaking during a discussion as part of the Jonathan Swift Festival at St. Patrick’s Cathedral last Saturday, former President Mary McAleese told the Irish people that they had no right to be questioning the rapidly changing demographics of our society. Celebrating this, McAleese declared that “today, 17 per cent of our population comes from somewhere […]
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. […]