Archive for the ‘European Union’ Category
Report of Public Meeting : Solidarity With the People of Ukraine – Bring the Stolen Children Home (Tuesday March 24 2026)
Report of Public Meeting : Solidarity With the People of Ukraine – Bring the Stolen Children Home
Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU) held a very fruitful meeting on Tuesday 24 March 2026 in the Teachers Club. Interesting insights were shared. The discussion showed us all the hope that if you take action, you can make a difference.
We thank Alex Yurov, Aishe Kurtamet (Crimean refugee and mother of her abducted son Appaz), Catriona Crowe (Archivist and Historian), Sandra Corrigan (INTO Global Solidarity Officer) and Ruth O’ Dea (Labour Party) for their contributions.
Alex Yurov reviewed the situation in Donetsk from 2014, when Russia invaded that part of Ukraine. He gave us details of systematic removal and “re‑education” of children into Russian territory.
Aishe Kurtamet told the story of her son Appaz who was abducted in Crimea.
Aishe gave a sustained account of her son Appaz’s 2023 abduction from Kherson, alleging transfer to occupied Crimea, detention, forced collaboration offers, torture, and imprisonment in multiple Russian facilities; she also reported her son’s father was later abducted, tortured, and sentenced.
Link to information about the plight of Appaz Kurtamet :
Appaz Kurtamet, Aishe Kurtamet
Sandra Corrigan, Global Solidarity Officer of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, described international solidarity work for teachers and children, including a solidarity fund, emergency supplies, trauma support, and advocacy that helped secure teacher salary increases for 2025–2026. Ukrainian teacher union reports emphasised the prolonged conflict and an education crisis.
Catriona Crowe described the fascist and genocidal nature of the war Russia is waging in Ukraine – one proof of that description is the systematic kidnapping and disappearing of children in zones of occupation. She drew our attention to the awful history of child abuse in Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes.
She highlighted the international attention shift away from Ukraine to other conflicts, such as Iran, and the need for continued support.
She emphasized the importance of providing Ukraine with adequate weaponry to resist Russian aggression.
She discussed the broader context of the war, including the unprovoked invasion by Russia and the significant casualties on both sides. war on Ukrainian children, including the kidnapping and indoctrination by Russian authorities.
Read the rest of this entry »Half a million people in London protested against racism and extreme right – Saturday March 28 2026 – report on the Eastern European Bloc
The European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine reports :
On Saturday 28 March, half a million people in London protested against racism and extreme right, in the UK mainly represented by Reform UK, a party that is also close to Putin and Trump, and against support for Ukraine.
A nice block of Ukrainian, Eastern European and British solidarity protesters also participated at the manifestation, with our friends from the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Vsesvit, Hromada Collective,Campaign for Ukraine, POMOC and the Polish left-wing party Razem.
Link :
https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/
“Stormont’s institutionalised sectarianism is beginning to look disturbingly permanent”
The Irish News columnist Patrick Murphy tells many home-truths about the Good Friday Agreement and the Stormont Assembly in Belfast.
This occurs in tandem with declining support for partition within the six-county bit of Ireland. A detonator of this trend was Brexit – the British state’s 2016 right-wing exit from the European Union.
Anti-Partition supporters of the Good Friday Agreement hope its referendum provisions will be enacted – forcing an electoral end on Ireland’s partition. These people need to address an ugly truth : an Irish unity referendum within the 6 county state can only happen with the permission of the British Secretary of State for “Northern Ireland” – an office currently held by Labour MP Hillary Benn.
Benn has categorically stated he will not authorise such a referendum. Credible opinion polls suggest that by the time of the next British general election (which must occur by 2029) the Westminster government could be controlled by the far-right ultra-Unionist Reform party led by Nigel Farage.
The best progressive way to end the partition of Ireland today can start with smashing Stormont. End institutionalised sectarianism and class collaboration – No coalition with right-wing parties such as the Democratic Unionist Party.
The way forward is :
1.Call for the formation of citizens’ assemblies which will draw up a political programme for the creation of a new 32 county Irish state
2. If the Irish state refuses to call a Citizens’ Assembly – something like the body which preceded the 2018 referendum in the 26 county bity of Ireland which repealed the anti-abortion 8th Amendment – the workers’ movement, women’s movement, trade unions, left-wing parties, and so on should take the initiative.
Read the rest of this entry »Former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of the Socialist Party has passed away aged 88 – Former Trotskyist at the centre of “a story of hope and missed opportunities”
The long life of former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who has passed away at the age of 88, gives us many useful explanations of the state of the left today, not just in France.
A useful list is here :
L’Echec de la gauche – the failure of the left
Jospin moved from the left to the right, and unsuccessfully tried to cover some of his tracks.
We reproduce two articles here from
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
- Lionel Jospin the former Trotskyist
- Former French prime minister Lionel Jospin: a story of hope and missed opportunities
Jospin lays the ghost of long past Trotskyism – The French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, admitted in 2001 that he began his political career as a Trotskyist
Lara Marlowe, Irish Times Wednesday June 6 2001
The French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, admitted yesterday that he began his political career as a Trotskyist. Mr Jospin responded to questions in the National Assembly following press reports that he was a Trotskyist revolutionary who infiltrated the Socialist party on the instructions of his semi-clandestine organisation.
Read the rest of this entry »“Don’t you dare call Epstein a paedophile” – Feared Irish lawyer from Belfast, Paul Tweed, threatened media on behalf of the late convicted criminal Jeffrey Epstein
Individuals operating within the network created by the late Jeffrey Epstein hired numerous people who threatened media organisations which were investigating a vast child abuse and financial corruption racket. One such individual was the Belfast Lawyer Paul Tweed (see below, a devastating story written by the Belfast Telegraph’s Sam McBride).
Jeffrey Epstein became a convicted criminal in 2008.
Don’t you dare call Epstein a paedophile:
Inside story of leading NI lawyer’s work to clean up vile billionaire’s image… threatening the media on his behalf
Read the rest of this entry »Donald Trump deploys US diplomats in Paris to threaten magistrate handling a corruption case against fascist politician Marine Le Pen
This story comes from the reliable source Le Monde, and is appearing on the public TV network.
Trump already has serious criminal convictions imposed by USA courts. Are French courts going to issue warrants for the arrest of the US president?
US official lobbied French magistrate over Le Pen’s election ban
The magistrate, Magali Lafourcade, said she was sufficiently concerned by the encounter to notify the foreign ministry.
PARIS — A senior policy adviser from the U.S. State Department asked a French magistrate last year whether she could interveneover the election ban on far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
The previously unreported details of the encounter will refocus attention on U.S. efforts to support the European far right. U.S. President Donald Trump has slammed the electoral ban against Le Pen as an example of using “Lawfare to silence Free Speech.”
French magistrate Magali Lafourcade told POLITICO that she and a colleague held a meeting in May with State Department adviser Samuel Samson, who made headlines last year for proposing the use of American taxpayer funds to support Le Pen.
Read the rest of this entry »Catherine Connolly Irish Presidential Campaign and Climate Change which threatens humanity
In a Facebook discussion, the Swiss eco-socialist activist Chris Zeller points out that the British “Your Party” makes no statement about climate change which threatens humanity – I wonder has the Catherine Connolly presidential campaign in Ireland made a climate change declaration?
Chris’s statement, which I endorse ” I have the impression that “Your Party” is no exception. In several European countries, we see that the traditional left and the trade unions are more or less consciously putting the ecological challenge on the back burner. I would go so far as to argue that the fossil fuel backlash we are seeing in all key sectors of capital has eaten deep into the traditional left and the trade unions.
We are currently less far along than we were possibly in 2019. However, the Earth system is changing abruptly. The effects will pose a concrete threat to the physical survival of a significant portion of humanity in just a few decades. Yet the imperialist countries – including trade unions and the left – assume that the suffering will spread far away from our societies in Europe and North America.
This, of course, raises important strategic questions. My working hypothesis is that we urgently need to build a transnational revolutionary eco-socialist vanguard.
We need collectives and organisations that vigorously oppose the fossil fuel backlash and the power of fossil fuel capital in general.”
Possibly Catherine Connolly makes a good start here :
John Meehan October 13 2025
“If Northerners had a vote, Catherine Connolly would be our next president” – Justine McCarthy’s interesting comment on the 2025 Irish Presidential Election
This article was published in the September 26 2025 edition of the Irish Times.
If Northerners had a vote, Catherine Connolly would be our next president
Northerners have a vested interest in an election portrayed as seminal for the abolition of partition. But they don’t have a vote
Catherine Connolly’s presidential election campaign would be a stroll to the park if Ireland honoured all its citizens’ rights. Instead, the Independent candidate is being accused of lip service by two parties that have ensured the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of potential voters from choosing their head of state.
Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland are allowed no say in an election that is being billed as crucial to their future constitutional status. Sinn Féin insists the next president must “champion a united Ireland”. Fine Gael says its candidate, Heather Humphreys, as a Presbyterian from a Border county, would symbolically unite the island. Fianna Fáil presents its candidate, Jim Gavin, as being Border-blind due to his involvement with the all-island GAA. Yet those living in the North’s six counties are silenced in the election. Their continuing exclusion reduces them to nominal citizens.
Addressing his party’s annual conference last weekend, DUP leader Gavin Robinson rebuked the Republic for what he called its “institutional intolerance of Protestant culture and heritage” but the southern State’s starker prejudice is against its own citizens in the North. Under the 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, affirmed by the 1998 Belfast Agreement, people in Northern Ireland are entitled to choose to be citizens of Ireland. As such, the Irish President is their president. Ever since Mary Robinson’s election to the Áras in 1990, the office’s holders have striven to represent them with their presence and their utterances. But across the Liffey in Government Buildings the realpolitik means that extending voting rights to Northern citizens would be electoral hara-kiri, virtually handing Sinn Féin the presidency on a plate.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 