Tuesday, Mar 16th 2010
The 9th Peadar O Donnell Weekend took place from the 16th - 18th October. On the Sunday morning there was an excellent debate on the future of the Left in Ireland.
Below are a series of videos from the main speakers. These included Pearse Doherty (Sinn Féin), Veronica Cawley (Labour), Colm Bryce (People Before Profit), Daithí [...]
Gerry Adams outlined Sinn Féin’s new campaign for a united Ireland in the Guardian yesterday. The London launch of the campaign took place on Tuesday evening, following a similar event in New York. If I understand the strategy correctly, SF intends to build a broad campaign in Britain and the USA in order to change [...]
The Left has often been accused of not understanding economics properly. So it’s been no small pleasure over the last year to see the guardians of neo-liberal orthodoxy thrashing around helplessly in a bid to explain the financial meltdown, while radical critics like David Harvey and Robert Brenner have provided by far the best guide [...]
Joe Higgin’s Election as MEP
Brian Greene has lots of audio (including singing!!) and images of Joe Higgin’s victory. As Brian says himself
“The Great Anti-Theft Movement had a major boost, the workers movement has a Marxist MEP in the European Parliament. From Lispole Co. Kerry, The Dublin West Socialist Party (CWI) Joe Higgins was elected after [...]
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at…”
Oscar Wilde.
Post-capitalism
The self-destruction of free market economics in the last 6 months has been dramatic. As a complex of fictional financial devices disintegrated the aggressive greed of both local banking systems and global financial markets has been openly exposed. Obscene [...]
Eoin Ó Broin’s Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (Pluto Books) looked like a timely book when it came out a few weeks ago. Events since have only emphasised the relevance of its argument.
The book opens with a trenchant defence of Sinn Féin against allegations that is an authoritarian, quasi-fascist movement. Ó Broin acknowledges [...]
In the second pamphlet on Italy from the archives of the Irish Socialist Network, which I’m republishing here to coincide with the two recent Perry Anderson essays on the Italian centre right and its ‘invertebrate left‘, the story goes back to the rise of the left in Italy towards the end of the Second World [...]
In two superb essays published in the London Review of Books recently, Perry Anderson describes the politics of Italy’s Second Republic in the context of the consolidation of power by Silvio Berlusconi and the recent history of the Italian Left, respectively. These are worth reading by anyone interested in politics and contempory European history in [...]
Recently on South Belfast Diary I leaked the draft Section 8 of Labour’s 21st Century Commission, dealing with Party organisation in Northern Ireland. Since 2002, the Irish Labour Party has allowed membership in the North. We have actively participated in conferences and have had an NEC co-opted member, Mark Langhammer. More to the [...]