I was reading a fascinating article in the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music recently. The article was about AL Lloyd, the great English collector of folksong. Lloyd had a remarkable life - orphaned at 15, sent to Australia by his relatives to work as a labourer on the sheep ranches, educated himself through distance learning, [...]

I woke early this morning and, as always on such occasions, my conscience got to me - atheists have notoriously active consciences. I’m inclined to think I may have wronged poor Davie Adams. An Dorcha is right that his former associations shouldn’t matter and anyway the situation in the North of Ireland at the time [...]

The following is an introductory paper to the forthcoming lecture in our education series an “Introduction to Marxism”. The series will recommence on Saturday 15th January at 11-00am, The New Theatre, Temple Bar.
In this class I hope to introduce a Marxist analysis of the economic system capitalism and ask the important question is the analysis [...]

…The United Left Alliance, launched 29th November 2010.
To download as a PDF (right-click this and select Save As)
Jodie Ginsberg, Reuters’ woman in Dublin, on TV3’s Vincent Browne Tonight on Thursday 25th November, when asked for her impression of the situation here, said “people are shell shocked”.
They have been for some time, but in little more [...]

The first decade of the 21st century witnessed two mass media events that stand out from the rest: the first was visible, the second was invisible. 9/11 and its aftermath offered a feast of visible shock and awe. These images were devoured by media consumers, but the human realities they portrayed remained at a safe [...]

Okay, it’s time to get all scholarly. I know, I know, yawn? right? But sometimes it’s important to see the bigger picture - even when that picture is inflated to the point of conjecture - in order to get your bearings. So, let’s begin.
There’s two very broad trends that interest me more than any other [...]

José Saramago 1922 - 2010
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) - [...]

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 [...]