Support anti-extradition protest, Newry, 1pm, Saturday, November 11

Saoradh in Ard Mhacha is organising an anti-extradition protest on November 11 in Newry.

The protest will take place at Newry courthouse, a long-standing symbol of British oppression in the border town.

Commenting ahead of the protest local Saoradh activist Clíodhna McCool said, “There are currently three Irish Republicans facing extradition from the Free State to the 6 counties.

“If this goes ahead they will be sent to Maghaberry prison where they will suffer

Public housing for all protest, Dublin, Monday, November 6, 5.30-7pm, City Hall

At the launching of Campaign for Public Housing

PROTEST! Monday, November 6 at 5:30pm-7pm, City Hall. Bígí Linn. 

Dublin City Council own 120 hectares of land – enough to build 12,000 homes. There are 20,000 people on Dublin’s housing waiting lists, and many more average income households who will never be able to afford private rent or mortgage. So why are we allowing private developers to make money off our land? Our city councillors CAN solve the housing crisis – by building mixed income public housing for all on public land. 

Campaign members Cllr. Éilis Ryan and Cllr Cieran Perry are putting a motion before Dublin City Council’s November meeting calling for a halt to ALL use of public land for private, for-profit housing. 

We are calling on all city councillors to support the motion to end the use of public land for private housing, and to support mixed income public housing on public land.

In review: UVF – behind the mask

I agree with most of this review.  And the review is well worth reading and thinking about, which is why I’ve reblogged it.  However, it also has a problem.  Mike M notes that whenever catholic and protestant workers have united, the protestant establishment has played the Orange card, and this has always succeeded in getting the protestant workers to split and line up again behind their exploiters.  Very true.  Yet, at the end of the review, what does Mike suggest? 

Well, he suggests protestant and catholic workers unting on economic issues!  The reason is that the political tendency Mike identifies with has never understood the importance of the national question.  At least, unlike the CWI followers in Ireland, they recognise that there is a national question; but they fail to integrate it into the reasons for the divisions in the working class in the north-east. 

So Mike falls back into suggesting as a road forward something he has already identified as failing!  Moreover, as Seamus Costello noted way back in the 1970s, you can’t trick the protestant working class into a false unity by ignoring the national question; they’re not stupid.  You have to be honest with them on the national question.  Instead of adopting a partitionist view which focuses on uniting wage-workers in the six counties across the sectarian divide, by ignoring the national question, it is necessary to counterpose the solving together of the national and class questions through uniting the mass of the Irish working class on an all-island basis.  This points to an all-Ireland workers’ republic in which the protestant workers would be free, instead of being the alienated tools of imperialism. – P.F.

Aaron Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask, Dublin, Merrion Press, 2017, £14.99; reviewed by Mike Milotte.

UVF: Behind the Mask is a vast if somewhat episodic account of the killings, feuds and internal factionalism of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force written by a lecturer at Sandhurst, the British Army’s officer training college. It would barely merit mention in this journal* were it not for its underlying, yet never fully argued thesis that Ulster loyalism is a genuine expression of Protestant working class discontent, while the violent conflict in Northern Ireland in which the UVF played such a significant part, was an “ethnic civil war”.

The author, Aaron Edwards, comes from an area of Belfast where the UVF was particularly active. During the “peace process” he befriended several leading UVF figures, one of whom persuaded him to write this book. While he rejects UVF violence, the book itself is permeated with a sense of Edwards’ high opinion of some of its worst perpetrators.

Socialists or pro-imperialists?

Edwards expresses sympathy for the views of former UVF men who have declared themselves to be socialists, but his key formulations are clearly at odds with the view of most left-wing activists and writers for whom working class loyalism is a form of

On An Post’s Che stamp

See here:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/10/06/irelands-che-guevara-stamps/

 

 

Seamus Costello

October 5 marked the 40th anniversary of his murder by the Officials.

There’s a chunk of material on him here and some also on the other blog I’m involved in, Redline.

The stuff on this blog includes:

1975 interview with Seamus on the initial attempts of the Sticks to destroy the IRSP

Text of speech by Sean Doyle, a comrade of Seamus in Wicklow, on the 35th anniversary of the murder

Miriam Daly – successor to Seamus and murdered a few years later – on Seamus

1969 educational talk by Seamus on Democracy and the Mass Movement

Seamus Costello’s 1966 Bodenstown speech

There is also lots of material on particular commemorations re comrade Costello.  If you click into the categories section, you’ll find there is a Seamus Costello category and you’ll find much more stuff there.

From the IRA to Saor Eire: Remembering socialist-republican Liam Walsh

Liam Walsh’s funeral cortege, Dublin, October 1970

 

by Mick Healy

Liam Pearse Walsh, who was born in Dublin in 1933, was totally committed to whatever he did: to his trade as a fitter-welder or the Socialist Republican struggle.  He was fiercely loyal to those around him: his comrades, family and especially his four young daughters.

Recruited into the Irish Republican Army by Liam Sutcliffe in 1954, Liam Walsh was active in Operation Harvest, the IRA border campaign of 1956-1962, eventually becoming the Commanding Officer of the South Dublin Unit of the IRA.

In 1957, he was interned without trial in 1957 in the Curragh Internment Camp in Co. Kildare.  His girlfriend, Jacqueline Barry, and his father, Joseph, visited him and brought food parcels and cigarettes.

Shortly after they were married in 1960, Liam and Jacqueline, like many of their generation,