"It's Capitalism Stupid" is the tag line for a festival organised by the Colletivo Prezzemolo -researchers and workers at the European Institute University (EUI) - in Florence, Italy which is running from 3 - 12 May, 2013. The festival is deliberately scheduled to take place at the same time and in contradistinction to the annual "State of the Union" conference at the EUI which brings together "leading academics, policy makers" and other members of the establishment to discuss matters EU from the insider perspective. Add a comment

Is a euro in a Cypriot bank, locked down by withdrawal limits and capital controls, the same as a euro in an Irish or French bank? Is a euro sitting in, say, a payroll account in Laiki with a balance of more than €100,000 (and subject to an unspecified “haircut” on Thursday) the same an “Irish euro”?

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On Wednesday, March 20, UCD Women’s Studies hosts renowned sociologist, Prof. Hill Collins for a  public lecture entitled ‘Where do we go from here? Intersectionality and Social Justice’. Prof. Hill Collins specialises in critical race theory and feminist theory, and is perhaps best known for her work on intersectionality, that is, the notion that people are often subject to multiple and mutually reinforcing disadvantages based on gender, race, or class, for instance. Below, Prof. Hill Collins discusses some of the key themes of her work.

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Micheál Martin is using events in the North as part of his strategy to revive Fianna Fáil’s electoral fortunes in the South. By Eoin Ó Broin.

The award for opportunist of the week must surely go to Micheál Martin. His opinion piece in last Wednesday’s Irish News was a timely reminder of Fianna Fáil’s cynical approach to both the peace process and to politics.

For weeks Belfast city centre has been brought to a standstill by illegal loyalist blockades. Night after night the same protestors have returned to their own neighbourhoods and engaged in running battles with the PSNI, causing real disruption to their own communities.

In more recent nights these riots have turned into organised attacks on nationalist homes in the Short Strand.

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There is hardly anything for which Labour stands, or rather stood, that it has not dishonoured in government in the last 22 months. By Vincent Browne.

Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore entered electoral politics via student politics and trade union politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Together they have done more than most to engender cynicism about politics generally from an early stage in their political careers and together, in government, they have done more than most to add to the mountain of cynicism there is now about politics.

Their early contribution to cynicism was the unexplained volte face on the radical politics they both expounded in their early careers. For instance, Pat Rabbitte excoriated the Labour Party in government with Fine Gael in the 1970s for its “betrayal” of its “principles and objectives”, claiming that the “capitalist system cannot fulfil the needs of the working class”.

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Historians’ understanding of the development of the Provisional IRA in the 1970‘s and its transition into a smaller, leaner but more politically attuned group - the precursor of the body that endorsed the Republicans’ journey into the peace process - may have to be revised in the light of a recently acquired British military account of a crucial phase in the war between the IRA and the British Army. By Ed Moloney and Bob Mitchell. 

“The Royal Green Jackets (RGJ) Chronicle of 1973”,^[1] a privately circulated journal which includes an account of a tour of West Belfast by the regiment’s 3rd Battalion during the summer and autumn of 1973, challenges a central pillar of the Provisional leadership’s narrative of their own rise to power.

It reveals that the IRA’s re-organization into cells - credited with rescuing the organization from defeat in the late 1970’s - was forced upon the group not because of a destructive ceasefire called by the IRA’s national leadership in Dublin in 1974-75, as the conventional account claims, but because of critical setbacks in Belfast more than a year earlier when Gerry Adams was the city’s commander.

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We have the resources to deal with all our problems. All we need is the political will to use them. By Vincent Browne.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has started the season on a positive note, which we all might try to emulate in 2013.

He said at the turn of the new year that 2013 would be the "year of recovery" and that the Irish presidency of the EU would bring "new hope" to people in the midst of the economic crisis.

To celebrate these positive tidings, schoolchildren - corralled in the yard of Dublin Castle - released 40 blue balloons to mark the 40th anniversary of Ireland joining the European Economic Community.

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Is there a significant moral difference between killing and letting die? By Vincent Browne.

Enda Kenny was afforded some further ammunition to target Sinn Féin by the recent revelations about Dessie Ellis, the Sinn Féin TD for Dublin North West, who certainly has questions to answer about the number of people killed or maimed via the bombs he assembled or helped to assemble during the decades of the Northern Ireland conflict.

He certainly won’t answer those questions and his Sinn Féin colleagues will equivocate and dodge on his behalf, expressing indignation over the baselessness of the killing and maiming claims, as though they are not and were not fully aware of what Ellis had been up to during the conflict.

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