Ireland

Industrial news in brief

The ballot for general secretary of the civil service union PCS will open on 7 November and close on 12 December. For the first time in 18 years, the sitting general secretary, Mark Serwotka, faces a challenge from the left. Bev Laidlaw, the Independent Left candidate, got 17 branch nominations, topping the number of 15 required to get on the ballot paper. Serwotka got 62 nominations. The candidate backed by the Socialist Party, Marion Lloyd, got 39. The SP was a dominant force in the union, closely allied with Serwotka, until about a year and a half ago. In the Assistant General Secretary...

Left split in Ireland

At the end of September, the Socialist Party of Ireland’s TD (member of parliament) Paul Murphy announced that he was leaving the SP to establish a new political organisation, RISE. RISE stands for Radical, Internationalist, Socialist, Environmentalist. It will not register as a political party, and its candidates will stand in elections under the Solidarity-People Before Profit banner. The move comes after a year-long debate inside the Irish SP about how the party should relate to wider movements, such as the environmentalist movement, which was part of a wider dispute within the SP’s...

An open letter on Brexit to Irish people in Britain

Brexit means the xenophobic and reactionary unravelling of the European unity that has taken many decades to knit together. And for Ireland, Brexit threatens nothing less than the catastrophe of a new partition. Isn’t it time that the Irish population of Britain raised a collective voice against Brexit? There are 430,000 Irish immigrants in Britain, and millions of people of recent Irish descent. Yet there has been no outcry from this potential power in British politics against the wrong being done to Ireland by Britain. In Britain Brexit has led to the creation of a government under a buffoon...

The Irish border and Brexit

One crucial aspect of Brexit, the impact on the Irish (or, rather, British-Irish) Border, was comprehensively ignored in the British media during the 2016 referendum campaign itself. It is fitting, then, that it has threatened to unravel the whole Brexit process, in the form of the “backstop”, a set of guarantees against the imposition of a hard border which have been written into the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU. The flipside of that fact is that Johnson’s drive for a “no deal” Brexit, if it succeeds, will mean in effect a new partition of Ireland, a reversal of the slow...

Make Labour fight Brexit

So far, so good! — as we go to press, on Wednesday 4 September. Britain’s poundshop Mussolini, the lying public-school bully-boy prime minister Boris Johnson, has been decisively beaten in two House of Commons votes. There will be almost surely a request to the European Union for an extension of the leaving date to 31 January 2020. Johnson does not have enough support in the House of Commons to carry out his threat to get round the decision by calling an instant general election. Johnson tried to override parliamentary democracy by shutting down Parliament, hoping that would give him space to...

Industrial news in brief

Harland and Wolff A hundred and thirty workers at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast face the loss of their jobs, after the employer went into administration. Workers have occupied the shipyard, demanding it be taken into public ownership. Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell visited workers there on Monday 5 August. The Unite union has argued the yard’s productive capacity could be used to manufacture renewable energy infrastructure. EMT out again on 17 August Guards on East Midlands Trains, soon to be East Midlands Railway, struck for a third successive Saturday on 3 August. The...

Morality and the Birmingham bombings

The "Birmingham bombings", on 21 November 1974, killed 21 people and injured 182 others through bombs in Birmingham city centre. The reaction to the killings included protest strikes; some workers seen to be sympathetic to Irish Republicanism being driven out of their jobs; and drastic curbs on civil liberties through a Prevention of Terrorism Act rushed through Parliament (with no votes against - supposedly as a temporary measure, but renewed again and again over decades until its provisions were folded into more recent "anti-terrorist" legislation). Six people were quickly arrested and...

Another victory in Ireland

Citizens in the Republic of Ireland have voted by an overwhelming 82.1% to liberalise the country’s divorce laws, in a referendum held on the same day as local and European elections. The vote continues Ireland’s path of social liberalisation, which was strikingly demonstrated by 2018’s decision to scrap the ban on abortion and 2015’s legalisation of same-sex marriage. Divorce was banned in the 26 Counties soon after independence, in 1924, and the ban was written into the 1937 Constitution. Even clerical-fascist Portugal never banned divorce; clerical-fascist Spain did, in 1939, but Spain...

Hard border: all the fault of the EU?

A bizarre episode occurred on 1 May in Cork, Ireland. Taoiseach [prime minister] Leo Varadkar was due to speak at a meeting organised by the ruling Fine Gael party as part of its campaign for directly elected mayors. The meeting had to be adjourned for a period when members of the Connolly Youth Movement (CYM) – the youth wing of the Communist Party of Ireland - disputed proceedings. Initially, the CYM’s intervention seemed fair enough. A woman stood up and called for a minute’s silence for two homeless men who had recently died on Cork streets. That was agreed by the chair. Then other CYM...

The Glorious Heresies

Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies is a strong debut novel, which won her the Bailey’s Women’s Prize in 2016. McInerney was already known for her blog, Arse End of Ireland, in which McInerney spoke about the impacts of the financial crash on Ireland’s poorest. The novel continues similar themes, focusing on those forced into the fringes of society in Cork. Ryan is a teenage drug dealer, whose gruff persona masks his hidden inner depths: his talent as a pianist, born of childhood boredom and neglect, and his strong desire not to turn out like his alcoholic father, Tony. A scene where he...

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