Ireland

On 22 October 2019, abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland (NI). This meant that, with immediate effect, no woman in NI who ends a pregnancy up to 24 weeks would be at risk of prosecution. On the second anniversary of the decriminalisation, pro and anti choice groups demonstrated. Abolish Abortion NI (a coalition of religious reactionaries against the right to choose) held a protest outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh during a service to mark the centenary of the foundation of Northern Ireland. The group are calling for reversal of the 2019 changes. Feminists marked the...

During the EU referendum, the “leave” side almost entirely ignored the implications for Northern Ireland, and when concerns were raised, dismissed them as part of “project fear.” When it became clear that Brexit would have a seriously destabilising effect on Northern Ireland, Johnson and the hard-line Brexiteers (including the DUP) opposed the May government’s “backstop” which, for all its faults, was an attempt to mitigate the problem and avoid a hard border. Now, together with his Brexit tsar, the malevolent clown David Frost, Johnson is deliberately using Northern Ireland and agitation...

Contains Northern Ireland: Conservatives confront conservatives Northern Ireland: not peace, but an imperialist offensive Ireland: call a congress of Republicans and socialists Northern Ireland: create the right atmosphere for talks Northern Ireland: there is no capitalist solution A united Ireland is a united people Northern Ireland: deal with the remnants of imperialism Northern Ireland: forget about the border Northern Ireland: the solution has to come from within Ireland Northern Ireland: the working class has been cannon fodder Northern Ireland: Labour can build common ground Northern...

This year marks the centenary of the partition of Ireland and the creation of the Northern Ireland (NI) state. It comes after a rare period of relative peace in the territory, and Unionists might have hoped that the celebrations could have been less contentious than previously. In fact the stability of both NI and Unionism have been thrown into question by the emerging impact of Brexit. The imposition of a customs border in the sea between Britain and NI, in flat contradiction to explicit promises made by Boris Johnson, has become a flashpoint for loyalist insecurity and anger. Street rioting...

In November 2018, the longtime Irish-based Trotskyist Rayner Lysaght debated with Sean Matgamna, a founding member of Workers’ Liberty, on Marxist perspectives on Irish history and the Irish revolution. The following day they had an extended discussion on related topics. This has been recorded and released as nine videos.

On 10 July, towards the end of a two day visit to Northern Ireland (NI), Labour leader Keir Starmer was asked, in an interview by BBC NI, what he would do in the event of a future border poll on a United Ireland. At first he dodged the question by insisting that such a poll was not an imminent possibility and it would be up to the people of NI to decide. When pressed by the interviewer though, he said that he “believed in the United Kingdom” and would campaign for the union and against a united Ireland. "I personally, as leader of the Labour Party, believe in the United Kingdom strongly”, he...

Rayner Lysaght died in Dublin on 2 July 2021, at the age of 80. He was one of the earliest and longest serving members of the Mandelite Trotskyist organisation in Ireland, from 1971.

Donal: Let's take the question of Protestant/Catholic unity. That's where you really show yourselves up. You accuse me of tail-ending the Republicans.

On 17 June, after less than three weeks in the role, Edwin Poots stepped down as leader of the main Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and requested a new leadership election. Prior to Poots, the DUP had been ruled by only three leaders in its 50-year history and by one leader (Ian Paisley) for the first 37 of those years. The party’s current inability to settle on a leader is a symptom of a much broader failure to come to terms with the changing society in which it operates. The immediate cause of Poots' downfall was his apparent agreement to have an...