The Dearg le Fearg march in Belfast, 2017. Credit: Ciarán Mac Giolla Bhéin As we approach the centenary of Northern Ireland, one thing we can be sure of is that official ‘celebrations’ will be absent any mention of the century-long state-sponsored suppression of the...
Beyond Representation at the International Literary Festival in Dublin, 2020. Photo credit: Eoin O’Neill In recent years, black people and the wider community of people of colour in Ireland have been gaining success in all aspects of Irish society. Yet there still...
Source: ‘quapan’ (flickr; Creative Commons) Despite tired refrains of ‘We’re all in this together’, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a stark reminder of the deep-seated inequalities that underpin our societies. In Britain, people of colour are still...
Mural of David Ervine, former leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, in Belfast. Credit: Keith Ruffles The political imagination of progressive unionism remains under-utilised in Northern Ireland. As we lapse into yet another ethno-sectarian struggle over how to...
Protestors march in support of Irish unification, London 1979. Credit: Gillfoto Not that long ago, the future of Northern Ireland – the bastard state that no one wanted – appeared secure. No respectable commentator expected a united Ireland this side of their, or our,...
Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan in The Foreigner My personal trauma is that I have had to watch a lot of shit films about the Troubles. An abundance of cliché, loner IRA men wrestling with their consciences, one-dimensional psychopathic, battle-worn colleens with...
Photo: Amardeep Singh Dhillon On 16 March 2021, Boris Johnson announced that the UK would be breaking its commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that the UK signed among with 191 other countries in 1968. It came as part of a defence and...
Photo: Marco Verch, cc.by.2.0 Boris Johnson’s masterful handling of the coronavirus pandemic has continued, with him personally developing not one but two separate vaccines. Unfortunately, since the BBC have already depicted chancellor Rishi Sunak as a ripped...
Low traffic neighbourhood in London. (Credit: motoringresearch.com) Low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) involve using planters, camera gates, bollards or other measures to restrict motor vehicle use in residential streets. In London, over seventy were introduced in six...
‘The spectacle is vulnerable,’ proclaimed the pamphlet Why Miss World? And so it proved to be on 20 November 1970, when activists from the nascent women’s liberation movement deployed rattles, chants, banners, flour, smoke bombs, stink bombs, ripe tomatoes and bundles...
Sarah Jaffe is a rarity in the US. Not only is she one of the few journalists still reporting on the labour movement, but she sits on an even shorter list of writers intent on covering the everyday stories of working people through a lens of dignity and empowerment....
Over summer 2020, there was a brief period when the government actually appeared to acknowledge Article 25 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the right to housing. Rough sleeping was virtually eliminated overnight, and evictions were...