Sam Nolan at 80 from conormccabe on Vimeo.
This is an eighteen-minute video which was made for the occasion of Sam Nolan’s birthday celebration in the Mansion House, which was held on Friday 8 October 2010.
The video is drawn from over eleven hours of Sam in conversation with Mick O’Reilly, former Irish secretary of the ATGWU [...]

Europe wide day of action in protest against the cuts and austerity measures being imposed by the EU Commission and carried out be national governments.  Please assemble outside the Anglo-Irish Bank  headquarters St Stephen Green at 12-30 and march to the Dail.  It has been poorly organised and advertised by the TU movement but everyone [...]

An analysis by the Research Section of the Workers’ Party
The global background
The current global crisis emerged from the workings of the capitalist class structure, initially in the USA and subsequently around the world.  Since the mid-1970s, workers’ average real wages in the USA stopped rising partly because the computerisation of production displaced workers and partly because [...]

Book Review: Ireland’s Economic Crash, by Kieran Allen, The Liffey Press
Kieran Allen’s excellent analysis of Ireland’s recession, the first that this writer has encountered from an Irish Marxist, is predicated on a single simple truth: Since 1970, in the worldwide capitalist system, profits have been falling. For example, ‘the profit rate in 1997 was only [...]

What follows deals almost entirely with internal divisions within Cork republicanism and is not meant as a comprehensive outline of republican and left-wing activities in the city during the period covered. Moreover, these notes were put together following specific queries from historical researchers and, hence, the focus at times is on matters that they raised.’ [...]

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 [...]

Radical Irish Lives: Peadar O’Donnell by Donal Ó’Drisceoil - Cork University Press
The recent reportage of the teachers’ unions conferences would have delighted Peadar O’Donnell, who began his career as an activist in the INTO. The general tenor of the media response was ‘how dare these people object to having their pay slashed and conditions of [...]

Here is a short seven-minute clip of Thomás Mac Giolla speaking at the Desmond Greaves School last September. I was there to record Brian Hanley and Mick Ryan for an audio podcast, but when Thomás got up to speak I grabbed my digital camera and filmed as much as I could before the memory card [...]

The following is a short extract from the recently published biography of political activist and former Labour Party Councillor Joe Deasy by Brian Kenny, published in association with the Hugh Geraghty-Crumlin, Drimnagh, Walkinstown Branch of The Labour Party. Details of how to get Joe Deasy: A Life on the Left are at the end of [...]