Mícheál Mac Donncha of Sinn Féin's Céad Bliain Committee, takes issue with Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche TD. The Sunday Independent of 16 January carried an article by Roche attacking Sinn Féin for marking its centenary. We carry below extracts from that article. Mac Donncha's article was submitted for publication by the Sunday Independent, who published an edited version as a letter. We carry his piece in full here. Free article

From 1979, the Thatcher Government had been planning the privatisation of the British coal industry. The Coal Industry Act (1980) set financial targets so high that they could only be met by closing 'uneconomic' collieries. The Act was intended to make the industry more attractive to private investors. Free article

In March of this year SIPTU established the union's first Organisation and Recruitment unit and have since expanded it to a staff of nine with an annual budget of over a million Euros. An Phoblacht's JUSTIN MORAN spoke to Noel Dowling, head of the unit, about declining union numbers and the efforts being made to turn the tide. Free article

Níamh O'Dwyer, a single mother of two little girls, Claire (five) and Kate (three months), has been given an eviction notice from her small wooden cottage above Lacken in County Wicklow, because it was built, some four years ago, without planning permission. Free article

The poet Brian Merriman, nest known for his comic masterpiece, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court), died 200 years ago but is remembered in a winter school this weekend, writes AN DRAOI RUA. Free article

An Phoblacht's famous weekly satirical column. Read on... Free article

Helena Moloney was born in Dublin in 1883. At the age of 19, she was deeply inspired by a speech given by Maud Gonne and decided to join Inghinidhe na hÉireann. On the day Helena went to join up at Maud Gonne's house in Rathgar, she arrived in the middle of a police raid. Free article