Ireland

Political pundits are predicting meltdown for Fianna Fail at the Irish general election. Whatever the result, all four of the main political parties in Ireland voted through the austerity measures required to get the €85 billion bail-out from the IMF and the EU. Whatever party or parties forms the next government, it will have little room for manoeuvre.

The following article by James Connolly was sent to the Left Communist group forum on www.revleft.com by a comrade in the US who has begun posting under the name Stagger Lee.

To listen to the media, you would think that reason had triumphed at last: the action of the great powers, led by the United States, has made it possible

The killing of two soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland in early March was only news to the extent that the shootings were ‘successful'.

On 12 June 2008 the European Union was once again thrown into crisis with the Irish electorate rejecting the Treaty of Lisbon in a referendum.

Calling for a no-vote alongside the defenders of ‘Irish independence' is not the only example of the WSM's nationalist tendencies. They also support so-called ‘anti-imperialist' struggles (which in Ireland means tailending Republicanism) and even for the nationalisation of Ireland's natural resources.

On the occasion of the centenary of the Belfast summer of working class discontent in 1907, John Gray's account of these historic events - "City in Revolt: Jim Larkin and the Belfast Dock Strike 1907" - first published in 1985, has been reprinted. Gray is not a revolutionary communist, but a Belfast Librarian, an historian and a trade unionist. At all events he has rendered a great service to the international working class...

This year the Irish Republic is celebrating 90 years since the 1916 Easter Rising. With the passage of time, the way this event is marked has changed. Nowadays it is presented as the indispensable precondition for the pride and joy of today’s Irish bourgeoisie: the so-called Celtic Tiger. The ‘blood sacrifice’ of long dead Irish patriots, and not the merciless exploitation of the living labour of proletarians from all over the world, is being put forward as the secret of the high growth rates of the modern Irish economy.