Top Issue 1-2024

25 November 2021 Edition

CETA: Is this how the republic dies?

25 November 2021

Barry Finnegan unravels the intricacies and implications of the EU’s proposed Comprehensive and Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada and its Investor Court System that could cost the Irish taxpayer tens of billions of euro. Free article

The politics behind An Phoblacht’s podcast series

25 November 2021

Back in 2016, Lynn Boylan commissioned a study into the high level of concentration in the Irish media. The report was damning and concluded that the 26 Counties has one of the most concentrated media markets of any democracy with RTÉ and private business owner Denis O’Brien identified as the two dominant actors. Free article

Britain cannot ignore the US on Ireland

25 November 2021

“Ireland owes Britain nothing”. The truth that made a video go viral. It was an answer from playwright and critic Bonnie Greer to a BBC Question Time discussion on Brexit. That was October 2019, the threat of a hard border and no-deal Brexit was in the air. Free article

News media business is failing audiences

25 November 2021

Finley Peter Dunne, the son of two Irish immigrants to the United States, was responsible for one of the most famous aphorisms about journalism. It comforts the afflicted, he wrote in 1902, and afflicts the comfortable. Free article

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The long road to justice for the Bloody Sunday victims

25 November 2021

Mitchel McLaughlin tracks the development of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign and also highlights some of the key events on the road to that tragic day on 30 January 1972 He shows how the seeds of Bloody Sunday were created in three key events: the introduction of internment on 9 and 10 August 1971; the Ballymurphy Massacre by the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment a day later; and the Civil Rights march to Magilligan Internment Camp on 22 January 1972. Free article

Recasting the conquest

25 November 2021

James Connolly called for the reconquest of Ireland by the Irish people. A mighty effort was made to achieve political reconquest between 1916 and 1921 but, 100 years ago, the British government, through a combination of force and fraud, managed to maintain its grip on Ireland and to recast the conquest. Free article

H-Block album relaunch

25 November 2021

I had the pleasure of being invited to say a few words at the relaunch of the album, H-Block, held on Friday 15 October at the Felons Club, Falls Road, Belfast. Free article

Postcards from a New Republic

25 November 2021

The ‘Postcards from the New Republic’ series is a hat tip to British designer, artist, entrepreneur, and Socialist William Morris’s ‘News from Nowhere’ series of articles from 1890 published in the Commonweal, the newspaper of the Socialist League and set in a distant future where Morris’s socialist, and romantic, utopia has been secured. Our story’s protagonists are Willa Ní Chuairteoir and Lucy Byrne accompanied by their four children James, Afric, Banba, and Alroy who together enjoy and endure the equity and exigency of the future’s New Republic. Free article


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