Crowds of young people at Glastonbury this year have been spontaneously erupting into chants of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’
Nothing so symbolises the political earthquake brought about by Jeremy Corbyn’s dramatic campaign in the recent British general election. Crowds of young people at a music festival chanting the name of a sixty eight year old white male Labour politician! This is unprecedented – more normal would be to be booed or ignored. Indeed there […]
It is not easy to write about Grenfell. The sheer horror of it: the burning tower in the night, people jumping to their deaths; the babies thrown from windows in desperation; families on their mobile phones knowing they wont get out.
To write about it you have to think about it and the thinking hurts. The matter is made worse by the fact that as I write, ten days after the fire, we still don’t know how many died. The official figure – and it has been slowly but inexorably rising – is now 79. It […]
The new exhibition at the National Gallery, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, which runs till 17 September, is well worth a visit. This is both for the art in itself – Vermeer is a wonderful painter and many of the other artists featured are also very good – and for what it tells […]
We do not yet know how many have died in the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower block in North Kensington in London. But we do know that behind this tragedy lies a scandal that must be investigated. Residents of the block had been campaigning about the dreadful danger they were being forced to […]
How they speak to us The 1% who run this society, the capitalist ruling class, speak to the rest of us i.e. the general public, a majority of whom are working class, mainly through the media, that is via a series of intermediaries – politicians, TV producers and presenters, news readers, newspaper editors, […]
One of the key ideas, tenaciously defended by the entire political establishment and ALL the mainstream media is that the law courts, the judges and the police are neutral.
One of the key ideas, tenaciously defended by the entire political establishment and ALL the mainstream media is that the law courts, the judges and the police are neutral. By ‘neutral’ they mean above or independent of politics, above or independent of social classes and above or independent of all interest groups. They simply enforce […]
Two recent reports cast a revealing light on what’s really happening with inequality in Ireland – its getting wider.
(picture: Denis O’Brien: down to his last super-yacht. Yours to hire at €326,000 a week.) The first was from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published on 28 February. It showed that the pay gap between men and women in Ireland is now 6.5 percentage points wider than it was in 2012, according to new […]
The magnificent strike by Tesco’s workers forced management to back down, at least temporarily and we hope permanently, on their threat to unilaterally impose changes in working conditions.
Following on from the victories by the LUAS drivers and Dublin Bus drivers this proves that strong industrial action works. The solidarity and commitment of the Tescos workers was outstanding. They are all low paid workers but they took action on a principle in defense of their fellow workers, understanding that an injury to one […]
Fianna Fail are defending the indefensible. In the name of ‘stability’, the stability of a rotten, corrupt system of which they were the main architects over decades they are propping up a government that is both malicious and incompetent in equal proportions. In the process they are denying the people their say, their right to […]
There is now widespread understanding among ordinary people in Ireland that if you want anything done in this country the way to go is People Power.
John Molyneux If you don’t want to pay unjust water charges no amount of letter writing and debate in the Dáil or on RTE will do the trick. You have to block the installation of meters, put hundreds of thousands on the streets and refuse to pay. If you want something done about homelessness don’t […]