Archive for the ‘The Irish Times’ Category
The War in Ukraine: Agenda for the Left – the most serious war on the European continent since the end of World War 2 in 1945 has not gone away, you know
Here are the latest articles published on the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine website ukraine-solidarity.eu in English.
For more information, write to the network at info@ukraine-solidarity.eu.
Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine has pushed Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine off the national and international headlines, but the most serious war on the European continent since the end of World War 2 in 1945 has not gone away, you know.
In a rational left-wing political ecosphere, all forces across the left would be promoting the information below, and seeking collective action in solidarity with the workers and social movements of Ukraine against Moscow’s sinister far-right invasion. It is time to step up solidarity with Ukraine, before it is too late. One of the articles linked below is reproduced at the end of this blog post : The War in Ukraine: Agenda for the Left . We also reproduce the latest news report written by the outstanding Irish Times Eastern Europe correspondent, Daniel McLaughlin.
Racist Scumbags in Ireland Are Burning Unoccupied Buildings – The Hug-a-Thug Policing Strategy of Garda Boss Drew Harris is coming home to roost
A question to Garda Boss Drew Harris : How is the Hug-a-Thug Policing Strategy Playing Out?
In 2023, in his weekly Sunday Independent columns, Gene Kerrigan wrote devastating examinations of Garda Boss Drew Harris’s strategy for dealing with escalating far-right activity in Ireland. November 23 2023 racist riots in Dublin’s city centre prompted this sarcastic Kerrigan twitter comment :
“The classic part of their playbook,” Drew Harris said of the far right, “is an over-response by the authorities. We are not going to fall into that trap.” How’s the hug-a-thug policing strategy playing out, Drew?
Source : The Drew Harris Hug-a-Thug Policing Strategy
Racist riots erupted on Dublin’s streets on November 23 2023. The “hug-a-thug” philosophy of Drew Harris finds its way into this Irish Times report :
Many Garda officers do not accept the disturbances on the night were “far-right riots”, saying the event was more nuanced. They say the trouble was whipped up by a small far-right element before opportunists with no ideology seized the chance to go on a rampage, taking on gardaí and looting shops.
Conor Lally, Crime & Law
How far right-sparked violence dominated the year in policing during 2023, Irish Times December 27 2023
The Irish Far-Right is on an arson roll – its activists are burning unoccupied buildings which are earmarked to house homeless refugees.
Read the rest of this entry »Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin opens the door to coalition with Sinn Féin
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has said there would be “huge difficulties” with his party going into government with Sinn Féin, but did not rule out the possibility of such a coalition after the next election.
Irish Times December 26 2023
Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG), two tweedledum and tweedledee capitalist parties, have controlled every government running the southern 26 county bit of partitioned Ireland since a 1921 Treaty was signed with the former occupying power, Britain. A carnival of reaction followed on both sides of the Irish border.
Faced with a false choice between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the only rational policy for the left was and is : no coalition, on principle, with any right-wing party.
The need for this policy is explained in this interview with Paul Murphy TD (People Before Profit, Dublin South-West) : To all of them we say: rule out coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – interview with Paul Murphy TD after the February 2020 Irish General Election
Read the rest of this entry »Irish troops to provide weapons training to Ukraine despite Government’s ‘non-lethal’ assistance pledge – Irish Times News Report, August 18 2023
“Department of Defence insists training does not impact neutrality and that there was no attempt to mislead public” – Irish Times
A copy of Conor Gallagher’s report is here :
Paul Murphy TD (Dublin South-West, People Before Profit) has issued a deeply mistaken public response, consistent with his party’s previously stated opposition to any military anti-imperialist solidarity action in support of the Ukrainian masses’ fight against a genocidal Russian invasion. Source :
This is a grim PBP Left-Evasionist chapter, part of the shocking story: failure to show anti-imperialist solidarity with the masses of Ukraine who are resisting a genocidal Russian invasion.
On July 29 2023 the PBP helped to organise a well-supported anti-racist rally in Dún Laoghaire, a town which proudly hosts a magnificent statue honouring the Irish anti-imperialist gun-runner and human rights activist Roger Casement.
PBP speakers drew attention to the many reasons we honour Casement today : but they overlooked a vital fact : this Easter 1916 rebel imported weapons from Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire in order to strike a blow against the then mighty British Empire.
John Meehan August 18 2023
Finbar Cafferkey: The life and death of an Irish fighter in Ukraine – Irish Times, July 15 2023
Dan McLaughlin and Conor Gallagher have written a fine tribute to Finbar Cafferkey. When Russia’s genocidal imperialist invasion of Ukraine is over – and hopefully is defeated – Finbar Cafferkey will deserve to be honoured as an Irish fighter who fought imperialist war at home and abroad.
How an Achill Islander came to fight and die as an international soldier in a foreign war
Colm Cafferkey was getting a bag of chips in Keel on Achill Island when he got the call saying his older brother Finbar was missing in action on the front lines in Ukraine.
Finbar and two other international volunteers were fighting with Ukrainian units in April to keep open a vital supply route to the city of Bakhmut, which was on verge of being overrun by the Russian invaders.
A sustained mortar strike hit the group, causing many casualties. Amid the chaos no one could be sure what happened to the 45-year-old Mayo man.
For the next week the Cafferkey family was worried but hopeful. Finbar had a reputation for disappearing for days or weeks at a time, only to pop up in another city or country.
Colm recalls them attending 1996 All-Ireland football final between Mayo and Meath and Finbar failing to show up at an arranged meeting spot.
“He rings us a few days later and he is in London. And then he rings a week later and he’s in Holland,” Colm recalls with a smile. “He could go three months without texting you.”
A week after he first heard his brother was missing, Colm got confirmation: Finbar was killed in the strike near Bakhmut, the devastated city in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, during Europe’s bloodiest battle since the second World War. He is the third Irish man known to have been killed in the fighting since the war started in February 2022. Continued fighting and the trading of territory between the sides meant recovering his remains was impossible.
Interviews with those who knew and fought alongside Cafferkey paint him as a brave, occasionally withdrawn man who was unable to stand still for long and who was willing to make sacrifices for his beliefs, even when it meant working alongside ideological opponents.
Read the rest of this entry »Irish President Michael D Higgins Mocked a British Empire Dame from Waterford, Louise Richardson – Is this Expert a good choice to chair an Irish Public Forum on the Neutrality Foreign Policy?
The Irish President Michael D Higgins is publicly opposing Dublin government attempts to soften deep public opposition to participation in the imperialist military alliance, NATO.
Speaking at length in a Sunday Business Post interview (June 18 2023) the Irish Head of State (a largely ceremonial post) concisely summarised the main issue :
Ireland’s foreign policy was one of “positive neutrality, and it can be defined very simply as Ireland’s right to belong to any group that it chooses in relation to non-militaristic international policy… If you interfere with that, there’s no difference between you and Lithuania and Latvia.”
Irish Times Online, June 18 2023
Set against the background of Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, President Higgins has upset the right-wing Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael/Greens + Gombeens coalition government (FFFGGG). Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin set up a public “consultative” forum examining Irish foreign policy – which is designed to push the Irish state closer to NATO.
To his credit, unlike many left-wing public representatives in Ireland, President Higgins unambiguously sides with the masses of Ukraine against the genocidal Russian invasion.
See for example :
Ukrainians Reject “Ridiculous” Calls for Negotiations with Putin’s Ethnic-Cleansing Invaders – That should be the Common Sense Policy of the Radical Left
Supporting, unambiguously, the right of Ukraine to defeat the genocidal Russian invasion with weapons supplied by NATO, does not mean supporting membership of NATO or its aims. Irish Citizens’ Army (ICA) commander James Connolly was a leader of the Easter 1916 Rising – using weapons supplied by the German war-mongers who were at war with the ancient enemy of Irish Independence, British Imperialism. The ICA proudly promoted a famous banner at Liberty Hall, headquarters of the Irish Transport and Geneeral Workers’ Union (ITGWU) : “We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland”.
President Higgins is out of step with current Irish establishment thinking on such matters. He made derogatory throwaway remarks about the chairperson of the Dublin government’s consultative forum, and its chosen experts. :
Michael D highlighted the composition of the panels at the forum saying they include “the admirals, the generals, the air force, the rest of it” as well as “the formerly neutral countries who are now joining Nato”.
The President made comments about the forum chairperson British Empire Dame Louise Richardson, and then offered a very qualified apology :
[I think this is best categorised as a Michael D Classic : A Non-Apology Apology]
President Michael D Higgins has apologised for any offence he caused by making a “throwaway remark” about the chair of the Government’s Consultative Forum on International Security Policy being a Dame of the British Empire (DBE).
A clarification issued by his office on Monday said President Higgins referred to Prof Louise Richardson of Oxford University and her “very large letter DBE” in a casual manner during the course of a long interview, which was published in the Business Post on Sunday.
The references to the DBE were received in some in some quarters as the President disparaging the objectivity of the Waterford-born academic, in advance of her chairing the forum.
The statement from Áras an Uachtaráin referred to President Higgins looking through a copy of the programme for the forum at the time of the interview. It said he was referring casually to the fact that almost every reference to Prof Richardson in the programme was in a bold typeface, with DBE in capital letters after her name.
Irish Times Online, June 18 2023
This spat is unlikely to benefit the Dublin government. The public pressure against the British Empire Dame Richardson should continue. We offer two further items of evidence meaning Dame Richardson should immediately withdraw from the role given to her by the forelock-tugging Dublin Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin.
Dame of the British Empire Richardson opposed the campaign of H-Block/Armagh political status prisoners, backing the terrorist policy of the Thatcher British Government
Dame Richardson strongly opposes the campaign in Oxford University starting “Rhodes Must Fall” (RMF) – this is a spin-off from the Black Lives Matter mobilisations. https://euroclio.eu/2020/08/13/the-legacy-of-cecil-rhodes-at-oriel-college/. here is the context :
When a protestor left a sign on the doors of Oxford’s University Church reading ‘Rhodes, You’re Next’, there was little doubt that the monumental Black Lives Matter movement, sweeping the world after the death of George Floyd, would next be turning its attention to the statue of the imperialist figure adorning Oriel College’s entrance arch.
With the pulling down of a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol only days earlier, a fresh series of protests, beginning on Tuesday 9th June, sought removal of the controversial monument of Cecil Rhodes, fuelled by the 19th century mining magnate’s association with colonialism and racism on multiple accounts.
On the 12th June, the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, released an open letter that reached no binary view about Rhodes’ legacy, though did warn against “hiding our history” and indicated little accord to the aims of the protestors. Her statement was also later criticised by fourteen dons at the University who wrote that it was “inappropriate” of Professor Richardson to “ventriloquise” the anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela, by using his words to defend a colonial-era statue. (1)
British Empire Dame Louise Richardson Must Go Now!
John Meehan June 20 2023
Philip O’Keeffe – A Comrade of Finbar Cafferkey – was arrested while travelling to Ireland to inform family of Mayo man’s death
Philip O’Keeffe, an Irish citizen who fought with Finbar Cafferkey against Islamic State in Syria, was arrested by British counterterrorism police on his way to Ireland.
Readers are encouraged to support Philip in any way that is practical.
This report comes from the May 19 2023 issue of the Irish Times :
A former comrade of Finbar Cafferkey, the Irish man killed fighting in Ukraine, was arrested by UK counterterrorism police last month as he attempted to travel to Ireland to deliver the news of the Mayo man’s death.
Philip O’Keeffe, an Irish citizen who fought with Mr Cafferkey against the Islamic State in Syria while they were both members of the Kurdish YPG, is facing prosecution under contentious antiterrorism legislation after being stopped by the Metropolitan Police while travelling through Heathrow Airport in London on April 22nd.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 