Ireland

Brexit rows boost divides in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been rocked by over a week of rioting, predominantly in loyalist working-class areas in several towns and cities including Belfast, Carrickfergus, Ballymena and Newtownabbey.

Brexit and the Six Counties: for a federal united Ireland

This year marks the unhappy centenary of the foundation of the state of Northern Ireland, which was born amid sectarian violence in 1921. The Brexit debacle and, most recently, the hastily withdrawn threat from the European Commission to trigger ‘Article 16’ of the Northern Ireland Protocol, have brought into sharp relief the dysfunctional nature of the Six Counties, and the underlying weaknesses of the post-1998 ‘peace process’. Amid growing calls for a ‘border poll’ on a United Ireland, socialists must address the situation head on, if an entrenchment of sectarian politics and growing...

Esther Roper, Eva Gore-Booth and "Urania"

Esther Roper and Eva Gore Booth had lived and worked together for twenty years when they, along with three others, launched their magazine Urania. It was 1916, the middle of the First World War. Less than three months earlier, 485 people had been killed in the Easter Rising in Dublin and Eva’s sister, Constance Markiewvicz, had escaped execution for her part in the rebellion on the grounds of her sex. Urania , however, was not an outlet for Esther and Eva’s anti-war activism. Nor was it a magazine targeting the tens of thousands of working-class women they had organised with in the suffrage...

Eireaennach

A place I lost I scarcely knew, The childhood land I never outgrew, My father’s life, my mother’s tales Of hungers, wars, workhouses, jails, The memories not quite my own To which my memories are sewn: Inextricably in Erin’s net, I am what I refuse to forget.

Marxists and “left governments”

“We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition… Our tasks... we realise not through the medium of bourgeois governments... but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a “defence” cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit...

Irish election: behind the left surge

The Irish election results have seen an unprecedented surge of support for Sinn Féin, overtaking both the establishment parties to win the popular vote with 24.5% of first preference votes, to Fianna Fáil’s 22.2% and Fine Gael’s 20.9%. SF’s vote was a rejection of the two-party system, which has seen FF and FG rotate in power since the early 1930s. This rejection was overwhelmingly fuelled by anger about issues such as housing, homelessness and health. Whatever SF’s willingness and capacity to deliver fundamental change on these issues, or its credentials as a genuinely left-wing party, the...

New decade, old approach?

Three years after Stormont collapsed, following the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), power-sharing returned to Northern Ireland on 11 January and a new Executive was formed. The general election on 12 December punished both the main parties, the DUP and SF. There was growing anger at the continuing deadlock, which saw a crisis in public services — NI has the longest NHS waiting lists in the UK and schools are under huge financial pressure — while legislators still received their salaries. A well-supported health workers’ strike for the restoration of pay parity with UK NHS staff (broken by the...

Johnson’s Trump-Brexit

According to the most thorough study so far, Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal will reduce average income per head in Britain by 6.4%. It will cost you about £1300 a year if your income is £20,000. That’s not as bad as “no-deal” (8.1%). It is worse than Theresa May’s deal (4.9%), and of course a lot worse than Remain. The bad economic impact comes from the barriers to trade and the barriers to immigration. Immigration, which mainly brings in young and energetic workers, boosts economic growth. That is not the worst of it. Boris Johnson’s prime alternative to the economic integration which Britain...

Johnson’s deal and Ireland

Sinn Féin has welcomed Boris Johnson’s new Brexit formula as a “least worst” option. It expresses a “cautious welcome for the perceived maintenance of the all-Ireland economy provided by the [new] Brexit deal”. At first sight that seems an odd about-turn. Although in the 1970s Sinn Féin was vehemently against the EU, it long ago changed that position, and in 2016 and since has been strongly against Brexit. It still says “there is no such thing as a good Brexit”. And Sinn Féin has long had a leftish colouration on social issues. Johnson’s new formula weakens Theresa May’s already-vague...

Make Labour stop Brexit!

Boris Johnson’s new Home Secretary, Priti Patel, declares her intention to end free movement “for once and for all”. For once and for all! From now to eternity, she wants to see higher and higher barriers between peoples, more and more national rivalry and strife, more and more closed-mindedness and narrowness. Labour can stop Johnson’s gang from getting away with it. Boris Johnson is floundering in the Brexit swamp he made for himself. It will be a scandal if Labour, or Labour “Brexit” rebels, allow him to scramble out onto dry ground this week. If he is allowed to pose as “The Man Who Won...

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