When two of Belfast’s biggest cultural festivals landed in the same week, the result was a city overflowing with music, dancing and impromptu performances on streets, in pubs and across parks. Read on for a firsthand account of the Feile an Phobail and the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann 2026, their roots in Belfast’s political history, and news of the celebration returning next year.
Mainstream western churches remain reluctant to name the genocide in Gaza while Israel triples its budget for influence campaigns aimed squarely at Christian congregations. Dianne Kirby looks at how the Church of England Synod’s fraught vote on Kairos II collides with a Pentagon funded alliance and a documented plan to recruit American pastors and social media influencers.
From the McPeake Family and the Dubliners at a Belfast youth centre now paved over as a car park to Pecker Dunne playing a guitar seemingly built from orange boxes, this is a personal tour through the folk music revival that shaped a generation in the 1960s. Alongside the memories of Ewan McColl, the Corries, and O’Casey plays staged in a Derryvolgie Avenue back room lies one quiet absence that only becomes clear looking back.
When John Pilger asked a Chinese man whether capitalists ran his country, the answer exposed a truth about the United States that has held since 1776: the rich have always governed the rich. This piece follows the line from the Civil War to Silicon Valley billionaires now pouring millions into blocking a California wealth tax, and asks whether America might be more honestly named the United Plutocratic States.
Peter Thiel’s data analytics firm Palantir has grown into a $390 billion behemoth, paying an effective tax rate of just 1.4% while embedding its surveillance software into government agencies from ICE deportations to battlefield targeting. This detailed briefing by Mike Morrissey traces how a company founded with CIA venture capital, and run by two men who question the value of democracy itself, is tightening its hold on the British state.
As NATO stumbles in Ukraine, the US fails to crush Iran, and Germany slides into recession, Eoin Ó Murchú argues that the political classes in both parts of Ireland are fiddling like Nero while the old world order collapses around them. From the housing crisis dressed up as “units” rather than homes to the sanctions driving up gas prices fivefold, this is a bracing case for why Ireland must chart a new course beyond a disappearing Western imperialism.
The Irish Government is pushing to scrap the Triple Lock on overseas troop deployments, a move critics say shatters solemn referendum promises made in 2002 and 2009 and quietly ends Ireland’s tradition of neutrality. Frank Keoghan examines why Helen McEntee’s claim of “taking back sovereignty” masks a deeper surrender to EU militarisation, and why the refusal to hold a referendum reveals a government unwilling to face its own voters.
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.