From an Olympian boxer turned Communist cleric who died fighting fascism in Spain to a fiery Chilean address on imperialism and workers’ victories in Africa and Asia, Belfast’s Féile an Phobail delivered a weekend packed with radical history and urgent political challenge. Discover why these gatherings left attendees convinced that building left unity has never been more essential in the face of rising fascism and war.
Ireland once prided itself on neutrality, but a stark comparison of its aid to Ukraine versus Palestine reveals a foreign policy quietly outsourced to Brussels and Washington. From Central Bank issued Israeli bonds to the Aughinish Alumina controversy, this piece asks whether Robert Emmet’s dream of Ireland taking her place among the nations has been quietly abandoned.
Delivered against a backdrop of racist pogroms, genocide, and the rise of the far right, Ciarraí Ó’Curnaín’s opening remarks to this year’s Madge Davison Memorial Lecture make an urgent case for why socialism remains our best hope and how we get there. This is a rallying call to move from awareness to action, rebuild class consciousness, and forge the broad based, internationalist movement our moment demands.
Siofán Ó Nualláin traces the legacy of Madge Davison, the communist organiser who ran NICRA from a cramped Belfast office and stood defiantly against sectarian violence, state oppression, and inequality during the darkest days of the Troubles. This article pays tribute to a radical Presbyterian activist who wove civil rights, feminism, and anti-imperialism together into a vision of justice that still drives us forward today.
While the Taoiseach boasts of surging home completions and momentum in the housing plan, the actual CSO figures reveal a 3.6% drop in new dwellings and a sharp 12.2% collapse in apartment builds. Eoin Ó Murchú dismantles the government’s spin, and the media’s silence, and argues that only a return to direct state construction and grassroots pressure from groups like CATU can break the grip of speculators.
As Sinn Fein’s Conor Murphy demands London and Dublin stop coasting, John Molloy argues the North faces a genuine crisis buried beneath the tedious rituals of Stormont party politics and public indifference to devolution. The Peace Dividend never arrived, and now Whitehall exploits dysfunction to discredit constitutional change. Progressive forces must demand real action before the next Assembly is restored.
Four Palestine Action activists have been handed sentences of up to eight years under terrorism-linked charges, in a case human rights groups warn signals a dangerous expansion of Britain’s counter-terror powers. Read the harrowing details of the Filton 4 trials, the restrictive prison conditions imposed on the defendants, and why Liberty and Amnesty International say these prosecutions threaten the fundamental right to protest.
As American industrial power crumbles and debt soars past 120% of GDP, Washington is responding with record military budgets, proxy wars, and escalating confrontations from Ukraine to the South China Sea. This sharp analysis draws on Lenin and Fidel to argue that U.S. imperialism has entered its parasitic final stage, and explains why the rise of BRICS+ and dedollarization may signal the definitive end of the unipolar moment.
Is football the new religion of the masses, and have sports commentators become its most zealous preachers? From Clausewitz to Orwell to a Marty Feldman sketch about a Nazi referee, Raymond O’Connell takes a sharp and witty look at how the World Cup has reshaped culture, jingoism, and the so called People’s Game.
As the Aughinish Alumina plant in Limerick faces the threat of EU sanctions, Irish government ministers admit they cannot reassure workers about their future, prompting fresh questions about whether Brussels has truly neutered Irish independence. Meanwhile the EU drags its feet on banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements even as it rushes through twenty sanctions packages against Russia, exposing a troubling double standard worth examining.