Irish history

The USA in the light of the impeachment hearing

Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions To an outsider, or to this outsider, anyway, the most striking thing about American political life is the saturation-level, all-pervasive, complacent chauvinism. It’s almost innocent-seeming, almost endearing, like the boasting of a five year old. The Stars and Stripes everywhere. The custom of always, in public life, referring to any state that has to be mentioned as “the great state of Wyoming”, or whatever. And the ancestor worship! Everything about the creaking, labyrinthine, 230-year-old constitution is as sacred as it is...

An open letter on Brexit to Irish people in Britain

Brexit means the xenophobic and reactionary unravelling of the European unity that has taken many decades to knit together. And for Ireland, Brexit threatens nothing less than the catastrophe of a new partition. Isn’t it time that the Irish population of Britain raised a collective voice against Brexit? There are 430,000 Irish immigrants in Britain, and millions of people of recent Irish descent. Yet there has been no outcry from this potential power in British politics against the wrong being done to Ireland by Britain. In Britain Brexit has led to the creation of a government under a buffoon...

The Irish border and Brexit

One crucial aspect of Brexit, the impact on the Irish (or, rather, British-Irish) Border, was comprehensively ignored in the British media during the 2016 referendum campaign itself. It is fitting, then, that it has threatened to unravel the whole Brexit process, in the form of the “backstop”, a set of guarantees against the imposition of a hard border which have been written into the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU. The flipside of that fact is that Johnson’s drive for a “no deal” Brexit, if it succeeds, will mean in effect a new partition of Ireland, a reversal of the slow...

A poundshop Lloyd George?

“Principles mean nothing to him — never have. His mind doesn’t work that way. “It’s both his strength and his weakness”. That was how the Tory politician Arthur Balfour described David Lloyd George, prime minister 1916-22, a leading government minister 1906-16, and a dominant figure in Liberal Party politics for most of the first half of the 20th century. A minister who worked with Lloyd George saw him as having an “absolute contempt for detail” but a strange capacity to improvise and “pick up the essential details of a question by conversation”. A biographer described him as “always in a...

When Tories threatened civil war

“There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities”, said the Tory party leader. That was Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Tory opposition, speaking about Irish Home Rule in July 1912. He added: “We shall not be guided by the considerations or bound by the restraints which would influence us in a normal constitutional struggle… “I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them”. He accused the Liberal government of “lighting the fires of civil war”, or, in other words, declared himself ready to use the fires of civil war...

Corbyn in the 1980s

The Times of 6 July 2019 ran an article by Dominic Kennedy, "Corbyn's hard-left blueprint revealed", attacking Jeremy Corbyn for his links in the 1980s with Socialist Organiser , a forerunner of Solidarity . Sean Matgamna, editor of Socialist Organiser in the period described, talked to Solidarity . We have serious political differences with Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. But Corbyn has the record of an honorable, serious left-winger, who - unlike many others who had some association with Socialist Organiser in the 1980s - did not change his coat in the years of Blair's New...

1919 - The fight for working women's rights

1918 had ended with British women voting in a general election for the first time ever. But it was only those aged 30 or over and who met a property qualification who could vote. That general election saw the first woman elected, but the successful candidate, Constance Markiewicz (pictured), refused to take her seat in the British Parliament that she and her Sinn Fein colleagues did not recognise as legitimate. Instead, Constance became Minister of Labour in the Dail Eireann, the first female Cabinet minister in Europe. The Labour Party pushed for extension of women’s rights, and in March 1919...

1919 - Throwing off the shackles of Empire

After Britain and its Allies had won the war, proclaiming themselves champions of freedom and democracy, the people of its imperial possessions stepped up their democratic demand for some of that freedom for themselves. India In its largest colony, India, Britain imposed the Rowlatt Act, extending wartime powers of indefinite imprisonment without trial. It prompted anger and rebellion, against both the Act and continuing British rule. The British left supported self-determination for India and other colonies, and in April, held a large public meeting in London, demanding ‘India for the Indians...

Letter: Trying to win Unionists is futile

I have been reading the record of my last October pre-debate discussion with Sean Matgamna . Your record tallies with my memory of it. However, I would like to clarify some points, especially as our second debate has had to be cancelled. As can be seen from the dates, this document reports two discussions made before the original debate on “Socialism, Ireland, Permanent Revolution and the Provo Campaign”. The cancelled debate was to be a second round of the actual polemic. Inevitably, mistakes were made. Having been interviewed over the telephone, I should have mentioned that the great mistake...

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