This article was first published in #CrisisJam on politico.ie.
In December 2010, Afri published a report entitled ‘The IMF and Ireland: what we can learn from the Global South’. We looked at the record of the IMF around the world (generally appalling) and argued that the Irish ‘bail out’ deal would have similarly terrible consequences [...]

This is an extract from a just published paper prepared for Action from Ireland (Afri), December 2010. Click the link to access the full paper (PDF): The IMF and Ireland: What We Can Learn From The Global South.
The Politics of Denying Democratic Choice
Ireland has been a member of the IMF since 1957.[1] Despite [...]

It is now possible to begin to draw a tentative balance sheet of the vast movement against the reform (or more exactly, counter-reform) of the pension system that we have seen in France over the last few months. We need to look at the depth and breadth of the movement, the forms that [...]

And the big difference in twenty years? Money. Lots of it now. Back then, not enough.’ (Aine Lawlor, May 2006)
On 31 May 2006 RTE broadcast a ninety-minute documentary entitled That Was Then, This is Now. It consisted of nine personal reflections on Ireland and the changes the country underwent from 1986 to 2006. The contributors [...]

Dear TDs,
It’s time for an election. It really is.
How long more can this charade of pretending you have a mandate from the “people” go on? You never had a mandate from the people in the first place - at most you had about 41% of a mandate from the 40% that voted [...]

An interview with filmmaker Eamonn Crudden
This interview is was originally published on media bite. You can watch the three parts of the Wallets Full of Blood trilogy here: Houses on the Moon , Zombie Banker Blues ,  Roscommon Death Trip
A compelling narrative of Ireland’s crisis of capitalism is very difficult to find. Those provided by [...]

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]

Gaza via London
Oh child of chance,
Oh blasted child,
Fair as ever anything,
Universe of wasted grace.
Kneeling now and always now
In your ruined house
Hearing troops of a general doom
Whistling with purpose
While priming their mortars for you.

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 [...]