In the June budget the Minister for Finance, Mr. Richie Ryan, announced that the two major Associated Banks [Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank] had agreed to make £40 million available to house purchasers over the next two years. The two major banks were each to make £10 million available for house purchase loans [...]

When The Internationalists were first set up in Trinity College Dublin in November 1965, it was not as a fully-formed Marxist-Leninist party, but ‘as an exercise in better staff-student relations.’(1) Prominent among the initial group was Hardial Bains, a lecturer in bacteriology who was originally from India, but who had left for Canada in 1959 [...]

First of all, the caveats.
The Quarterly Household Survey (QHS) is a sample survey, compiled by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), the details of which are outlined in Tuesday’s post which looked at broad occupations.
There are 21 economic sectors in the NACE Rev.2, and for its purposes, the CSO has amalgamated some of these to give [...]

Continuing on from our August 2009 post on the Quarterly Household Survey (QHS), Q1 2009, this is a look at employment and unemployment in the Republic, Oct-Dec ‘08 to Oct-Dec ‘09, based on the QHS Q4 2009.
We know that due to the government’s active pursuit of deflation, Ireland’s GNP shrank by world-beating 11.3% in 2009. [...]

As with the first article in this series, forgotten faces is more of a discussion piece than a finished analysis. It’s only in the later issues of The Ripening of Time, especially nos. 11 and 13 which date from 1979 and 1980 respectively, that we get a full and detailed Marxist analysis of Ireland in [...]

Last month Tom Redmond of the CPI gave me a large collection of newspapers and pamphlets relating to the Irish left, including all fourteen issues of The Ripening of Time (1976-1982), an Irish Marxist journal produced by the Ripening of Time collective.
Throughout its six-year run, The Ripening of Time provided introductions to Marxist theory, as [...]

Below is a clip from an interview with Sam Nolan of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions, where Sam discusses the 1979 tax marches. It’s taken from a series of interviews which have been conducted with Sam, and which chart his life as a political and trade union activist, going as far back as the [...]

Ostensibly an official history, John Cunningham’s study of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), and its relationship with the education system, also touches on four key elements of Irish society over the past 100 years: religion, class, politics and economics. It looks at the changes in Ireland since the foundation of the association [...]

[Migrant Rights Centre Ireland writes:]
Today the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) is launching a pamphlet that critiques Ireland’s political leadership on migration, and its commitment to equality in the current recession.
The political pamphlet, Hidden Messages: Overt Agendas, was written by Niall Crowley, equality expert and former CEO of the Equality Authority. It compares the [...]

New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work by Kevin Doogan (Wiley Press, 2009)
The subtitle of this book is slightly misleading: the book’s focus is not so much the transformation of work in recent years, but rather the distance between the discussion of work by academics, journalists, and politicians, and the material reality of work in the [...]