THE peat floor of Francis O’Connor’s set still smells of damp earth as the witches hiss their prophecies. This is the world of Druid Theatre Company’s Macbeth, directed by co-founder Garry Hynes – a production that is by turns magnificent, frustrating, and ultimately worth your time.

COMING up to May Day- we will highlight  the state of the world as we go from one crisis to another-and from one war to another. As we experience the naked force of imperialism in different ways-the people in Lebanon, Iran, and Palestine are suffering the full force of the US and Israel’s war machine. In Cuba and other parts of the world the economic effects of capitalism in crisis is bringing raging disruption. Thousands if not millions are protesting against the war and genocide only to be met with hypocrisy and reactionary action. In Britain legislation to restrict protests is being introduced and protesters are being arrested.  It is somewhat ironic that people with vehicles are prepared to come out and protest over the fuel crisis, but they are not willing to direct their anger to the cause of the situation to confront Trump, Israel and those governments who  tacitly support them. Even to shift the protest to the American Embassy in Dublin.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948) confronts a world shaped by war, destruction, and the fear of total annihilation. Echoing Bertolt Brecht’s warning that civilisations can vanish without trace, the play imagines what remains after catastrophe. Its stark setting — “a country road, a tree, evening” — reduces existence to a minimum, asking what will be left of humanity after another war.

IN 2002 the United States Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, reflecting on the failure to find what wasn’t there in the first place, Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” that posed an imminent threat to the U.S., famously wrestled with the English language and lost.

IN February, the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council delivered it’s assessment of the three-year budget proposals prepared by the Department of Finance. The Council was established in 2021 to ‘bring greater transparency and independent scrutiny to the region’s public finances, focusing on the NI Executive’ (The Finance Minister’s proposed 2026-2027 to 28-29/29-30 Budget: an assessment). In short, it is a regional version of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Council’s chair, Robert Chote, previously ran the OBR and, before that, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – it’s pretty heavyweight.

At the threshold of the imperial age, as Enlightenment optimism dissolved into war, famine, and repression, Jenny Farrell revisits Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War to uncover the emergence of a modern aesthetics shaped by terror itself. Her essay reads Goya’s haunting etchings not as historical illustrations but as a radical confrontation with violence stripped of heroism, exposing the psychological and social collapse wrought by war and reaction. Moving from atrocity and starvation to nihilism and the fragile persistence of truth, Farrell shows how Goya forged an art that refuses moral comfort while demanding that suffering be seen. The result is a powerful reflection on how art bears witness when history descends into darkness and why Goya’s vision remains urgently contemporary.

As global tensions sharpen and military spending surges across Europe, the threat of war is no longer a distant abstraction but a looming reality that could shape the lives and deaths of a new generation. In this stark warning, Eoin Ó Murchú writes for Unity that rising militarisation, escalating great-power rivalry, and Ireland’s deepening security ties with Britain signal a dangerous abandonment of neutrality at precisely the moment when the risk of nuclear catastrophe is growing rather than receding.

Two and a half centuries after Adam Smith warned that powerful interests conspire against the public, a new aristocracy has emerged not of land but of data, platforms and unimaginable wealth. In this article, Mike Morrissey argues that today’s techno billionaires command fortunes larger than nations, shape political narratives under the banner of “free speech,” and increasingly blur the line between private power and public authority. As wealth concentrates at historic speed and digital empires intertwine with populist politics, the question is no longer whether capitalism produces inequality, but whether democracy itself can withstand an age of techno oligarchy.