Below is an interview with a comrade of ours who explains his progression from being a member of the IRA, through Trotskyism to a World Socialist position. Discussion between Richard (Dick) Montague and Ciaran Crossey Belfast, 21 November 1987 CC I was given your name as a socialist activist in the ’40s by Vincent McDowell. What I’m trying to uncover is information about the minor socialist groupings in Ireland during the ’30s and ’50s. RM Vincent McDowell had been interned in Belfast during WWII. He came out wiser but he was not prepared to publicly say so. He broke...
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The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) defines “middle class” as people who have at their disposal between 70 percent and 150 percent of the average after-tax income. For a single person, that means between €1070 and €2350 per month. despite falling unemployment, the proportion of individuals and families living on roughly average incomes has dropped, weekly Die Zeit reported. Germany’s “middle class” has been steadily shrinking since the late 1990s. The share of middle income earners as a proportion of the population fell from 59.2 percent to 58.7 percent over the course of 2008 – the last year...
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Roughly 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, which is one person every three and a half seconds according to www.poverty.com. Individuals who live in poverty lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves, which causes them to become weaker and often sick. These individuals would become even more poor and more hungry because being sick will make them less able to work and provide for themselves and/or their family. According to the UN and the World Bank, the social impact of the global economic crisis continues to be felt in terms of rising...
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A few years back , the Herald reminded its readers of the estimated 1.5 million Roma murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, an episode that has come to be known in the Romani language as the Porraimos (the “devouring”). Later, it is reported that “The far right is on the march in Hungary, literally. In recent months, hardly a week has gone by without a rally being held by the Magyar Garda or “Hungarian Guard,” their members decked out in black boots and uniforms bearing nationalist symbols last employed by Hungarian fascists during World War II. Their target: Romany (gypsy) criminals...
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James Connolly was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868, the son of an Irish immigrant labourer. He went to work at the age of ten or eleven and then seems to have joined the British army, being stationed in Cork. In 1889 he left ( deserted ) and went back to Scotland planning to marry a girl he had met in Dublin. In Dundee Connolly, who must already have had vague radical Irish nationalist sentiments, joined the local branch of the Socialist League. This was a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, in which William Morris...
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From the Socialist Standard, July 1989. Up until 1789 France was an Absolutist state ruled by a king who claimed that his total power to rule had been granted him by god. All the top posts in the army, the government, the civil service, the church and the judiciary were reserved for the members of a hereditary nobility. The population was in fact divided into three “orders” or “estates”: the clergy, the nobility and the rest – over 95 per cent of course – known simply as the Third Estate. Relics of Feudalism The vast majority of the population...
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The Real IRA and the Continuity IRA represent nothing but the pale ghosts of yesterday. For over a hundred years now Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland since it came into existence in 1921, has been politically structured by what Sean O’ Casey called, in one of his memorable plays, The Shadow of the Gunman. The gunman, and more recently in deference to the times, his female equivalent, has been legal and illegal, protestant and catholic, brave and cowardly but at all times and in all guises, a dangerous irrelevancy as far as the working class is concerned. Ruling classes...
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Violence will not make people into socialists Two British soldiers shot dead at Masserene Barracks in Northern Ireland, and a policeman shot dead in Craigavon, by dissident Republicans who want to re-draw the present political frontiers. Instead of dividing the six counties from the rest of Ireland, the frontier (they demand) should be moved and instead divide Ireland from the somewhat larger island to the east, containing the capitalist entity known as Great Britain. But socialists do not want to re-draw any frontiers: they want to abolish frontiers. Frontiers are entirely artificial boundaries, whether by land or sea. All...
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A decade on from the Nato bombing campaign, more than 90,000 Serbs are still in danger from unexploded cluster munitions, according to a recent report funded by the Norwegian foreign ministry. The report says they face a daily threat and estimates that there are some 2,500 unexploded devices in 15 areas of Serbia. In the capital, Belgrade, and elsewhere in Serbia you can still see the impact of the bombing. “The 10th anniversary of the air strikes will lead people to think about the bombing campaign, which they saw as unjust, unfair and illegal action carried out by Nato,”...
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A socialist in Ireland looks at the vote there to reject the EU’s proposed Treaty of Lisbon. On the 12th of June, voters in the Republic of Ireland rejected a constitutional proposal to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. The rejection has caused ripples across Europe and provoked a lively and continuing discussion in the letters pages of the newspapers and in radio phone-in programmes. It is a quintessential example of what passes for ‘politics’ under capitalism with heated debate amongst the protagonists and yet the result is as irrelevant to most people as the composition of government here after the...
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