The Indian poet Varavara Rao was arrested and jailed in the aftermath of a violent protest at Bhima Koregan on 1 January 2018. Alongside ten other defendants, Varavara Rao denies all the charges raised against him. The elderly poet contracted COVID-19 while in prison and has been over two years in jail under appalling conditions […]
Socialism and Sinn Féin
“Sinn Fein has won the election,” declared party leader Mary Lou McDonald (with some justice) in early February, as results confirmed that for the first time in the history of the Irish State, neither Fianna Fail nor Fine Gael had achieved a clear majority or path to forming the next government, while “Ireland’s left-wing nationalist […]
Review: Reading ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’ by Jason W. Moore after COVID19
A few weeks into the current lockdown, as fatalities and reported cases of COVID19 were continuing to rise, news from the frontlines of Ireland’s food production and agri-sector began to arrive, casting an unsettling light on the many – and now overtly dangerous – levels of exploitation on which this cornerstone of the national economy […]
Review: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Speaking in the extended aftermath of the so-called Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson, the slave-owning US president famed for his previous (and merciless) warfare against Creek and Seminole tribes in the American South, laid out the case for indigenous extermination. ‘They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire […]
Derek Mahon, A Poet of The Left
By Ciarán O’Rourke ‘I know the simple life / Would be right for me’, wrote Derek Mahon in Ovid in Tomis, ‘If I were a simple man.’ A glad complexity, it seems, is the order of the day; a dynamic interweaving of expression and insight evident throughout Mahon’s work, lending the poems both a clarity […]