POLITICAL EVENTS in Northern Ireland are generally given scant coverage in the popular British press or broadcast media.

The latest Tory and media attack on Jeremy Corbyn comes at a time when the polls are showing a Labour revival. That is, they need to portray the Labour leader as a Sinn Fein/IRA supporter

On Friday 24 March, workers at Irish bus and coach operator Bus Eireann began an indefinite all-out strike. Five trade unions representing 2,600 workers, including SIPTU and the National Bus & Rail Union (NBRU) have called the action. Pickets outside bus stations were organised throughout the Republic. On the first day of action rail services […]

Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, ex deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and ex IRA leader, has died. He played a hugely influential role in the long armed struggle against the Unionist and British state and in negotiating the subsequent 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the war.  For the former the British media and politicians […]

Brexit will have enormous political and economic ramifications on both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Since the EU referendum, for example, Irish food and drink exports to the UK have fallen by €570 million, according to the Republic of Ireland’s Bord Bia. Food and drink account for 41% of Ireland’s exports to the UK, while […]

By Chris Clough Dublin, Easter weekend 2016, saw tens of thousands of people line the streets. Flags, banners and photos of martyrs were displayed on every street corner, shop and building. Socialists and Republicans marched through the city while the government held a military parade, complete with a fly over. Graffiti and stickers called for […]

  The Irish general election result has delivered a huge blow to the outgoing Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. Although Fine Gael will still be marginally the largest party, despite losing around a third of their seats, the plunge in the Labour vote from 19 to just below 7 per cent rules out a repeat coalition. […]

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has called a General Election for February 26. This will be the shortest election campaign in the history of the state, just three weeks. In response to this indecent haste a Sinn Fein TD’s comment summed it up well as ‘a pathetic end to a pathetic Dail’. Indeed it was a pathetic […]

By Bernie McAdam 20 April 2015 The Socialist Party in Ireland is deeply worried. Senior trade union officials like Irish Congress of Trade Unions President John Douglas and Jack O’Connor, leader of the south’s biggest union SIPTU, are courting Sinn Fein. They have responded by producing the article ‘Trade Unions and Sinn Fein: Dangerous Times’ […]

By Bernie McAdam 16 March 2015 A mass strike involving up to 50,000 public sector workers was held across the north of Ireland on Friday 13 March. NIPSA, UNITE, INTO, GMB and UNISON called out members in transport, health, social services, education and the civil service against the Stormont Executive’s plans to cut the Budget […]

By Bernie McAdam and Darren O’Coghaidhin Ireland is in the midst of a massive revolt against its government’s attempts to slap water charges on the Irish people. On October 11, at least 100,000 marched in Dublin to protest against this regressive tax. On November 1, a total of some 200,000 marched in over one hundred […]

The recent surge in racist attacks in the six counties of ‘Northern Ireland’ is a shocking indictment of the British backed sectarian state. Bernie McAdam reports on this development against a background of further strains on the Good Friday Agreement as Unionist and Loyalist leaders insist on Orangemen marching their way back through a Catholic […]

In 1913 Dublin workers waged a heroic battle against their employers, the church and the police. Despite being defeated, argues Bernie McAdam, the lockout lives on as the most inspirational act of working class resistance in Irish history.

The Socialist Party of Ireland has announced its withdrawal from the United Left Alliance (ULA). The Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG) departed last year and only the People before Profit Alliance/Socialist Workers Party, along with non aligned activists, remain in the depleted ranks of the ULA. The General Election 2011 had seen the recently […]

The task of the day is to organise citizens’ defence committees to defend the Short Strand and Catholic communities, says Bernie McAdam. These could then become the basis of a political alternative to the government’s cuts programme and the continuing repression

Finally, Desmond de Silva’s report into the murder of Pat Finucane, the Belfast solicitor, has been released. The Report found that there were ‘shocking levels of state collusion’ in the murder. It told of the ‘wilful and abject failure by successive governments’ to run agents lawfully. It confirmed that Pat Finucane had been murdered by […]

Joy Macready reports on the growing backlash against a women’s right to choose In September, a woman was jailed for terminating her pregnancy in its final stage. Sarah Catt took a drug that she purchased on the Internet to cause an abortion in 2009, and now faces eight years in prison for it. To give […]

VETERAN IRISH Republican Marian Price has been imprisoned without trial since May 2011. This harks back to the British government’s widespread use of internment in the 1970’s as a way of silencing opposition to its rule in the north of Ireland. This repressive policy only succeeded in broadening the scale of the anti-Unionist and anti-British […]

The explosion that claimed the life of Omagh policeman Ronan Kerr does not further the struggle against British occupation in Ireland one jot, writes Bernie McAdam.

A new political situation has emerged in Ireland with real opportunities for the left to lead the anti cuts struggle. Bernie McAdam reports

The war in the Six Counties is a war between British imperialism and the Irish people. But this fact is still not clear to many on the British left.