Wednesday, Feb 8th 2012
Pdf of SPI 1973 Report of the 1st national congress here: SPI73REPORT
As a means of opening the discussion on the SPI the accompanying document was donated by Mark P (for which many thanks and many thanks also to the SP for allowing us access to some documents from their archive) and seems entirely suitable for [...]
The following clip is from an interview with Joe Deasy, who was born in 1922 and who met and worked with Jim Larkin Snr in the 1940s. Both were Labour councillors on Dublin Corporation. Joe would later leave the Labour party and join the Irish Workers League, which was a communist organisation, the antecedent to [...]
In September 2009 I interviewed John Throne about his own history, as well as the Irish left and working class. We talked for about two hours and after I had stopped recording, I asked John would it be ok to ask him about his expulsion from the Committee for a Workers’ International. He said yes, [...]
Below is a recording of Harry Browne at the launch of the Irish Socialist Network’s latest pamphlet, A force for progress? Five myths about the European Union. The event took place in Connolly Books, Essex St, Dublin 2.
Income is not a determinator of class, and to think of class in such terms is to miss the point that class is a social relation, not a category. Income, however, can be used as an indicator of class relations, as wage levels are usually, although not always, related to the types of positions people [...]
You can pick your friends but not your friends’ friends. Out last night with some of the former who brought some of the latter and, of course, their conversation turned to the recession. And those of the latter were real Euro-jockeys, propounding such thoughtful gems as ‘trade unions are sapping our vitals’. [...]
One of my wonderful, pious, intrepid apparition spotters in America alert me to the news that Our Lady was recently making an appearance in Salinas, California, at the Old Town Bar & Grill restaurant. Our Lady was not a customer, however. No. She was spotted by a plumber in a floor drain! What could she [...]
It must be great to be a spokesperson for employers. You can just plonk yourself in front of a microphone and say anything that comes into your head, no matter how outrageous or unsubstantiated. On Thursday’s Morning Ireland Mark Fielding of ISME was being interviewed together with UNITE’s Jerry Shanan. Mr. Fielding [...]
Did anyone catch the curious symmetry? On the day that unemployment, once again, shot up, AIB announced their half-yearly profits. Two different worlds on this small island.
Not that there weren’t attempts to show that these different worlds are experiencing the same thing. The Irish Times headlines: AIB Profits Fall. And [...]
Si, is brilliant Spanish bicyclist Carlos Sastre, who win France’s Tour de France last week in Paris, France, putting the seal (and also the lion) on a fine summer for Spanish virility, which have seen the man-boy-child Rafa Nadal also lick all-comers at Wimbledon, England, and the genius national football team win Euro 2008 in [...]
