Workers Solidarity Movement

Brendan Lillis is a prisoner in Maghaberry jail in the North. He is close to death, weighing only 5.5 stone and having an estimated 10 days to live. His partner has pleaded for support as she watches Brendan slowly die. There is a media blackout and he can no longer speak nor move, and is confined to his bed, in a prison cell with no windows.

Rioting erupted in ‘nationalist areas’ across the North on Tuesday after the annual Orange Order parades. The worst of the trouble was in Ardoyne in North Belfast which left 16 police officers injured and with over 60 lethal plastic bullets fired leaving many people injured.  WSM member 'John Creagh' reports from the Ardoyne on the disturbances and what they tell us.

More than 20,000 people demonstrated for electoral reforms across Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, on Saturday in a rare protest that was declared illegal by police.

Very few progressives will mourn the passing of the ‘News Of  The World’.  When Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, announced that the paper was to cease publication many cheered.  Revelations over the past few days about the extent to which private investigators and some journalists and executives completely disregarded common human decency in their scramble for profits had exposed the tabloid as scurrilous and without shame.

After spending tens of thousands of euro in promotion Youth Defense's anti-choice march finally took place in Dublin. Despite the free coaches and months of preparation even RTE admitted that only 2-5,000 took part, making it a tiny fraction of the Pride Parade of the previous Saturday. And from observation a large part of that crowd was composed of unhappy looking young children dragged along by relatives, priests, monks, nuns and the very elderly.

In this article, I look at how a nobel prize winning author's, José Saramago's ideas are reflected in the Real Democracy Movements goals.

When the old man picked up the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, he referred to himself in the third person as ‘The apprentice’.   

“The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.”

Attempts by the Israeli government to sabotage the International ‘Stay Human’ Freedom Flotilla to Gaza have resulted in 2 ships – the Greek-Swedish Juliano and the Irish-owned MV Saoirse – having to withdraw from the Flotilla following damage to both. An emergency demonstration was held at the Spire in Dublin last night to protest the sabotage, see the pictures below.

A good few words in the world originate from my mother tongue Greek. Nearly all words in Greek mean something. That helps me understand things better  when i interact with people in English plus it creates a sense of pride. In my opinion, specially in the last 100 years, the political systems, we all live in, have tried very hard to manipulate words and language. They constantly change the meaning of the words we are using, to either mean something completely diffrent to what their original real meaning was, or to make them soft, light and insignificant without power.

The population of Greece are in revolt again the IMF /ECB austerity plan that is being imposed on them.  WSM member Con who is a migrant to Ireland from Greece tells us what it is like to follow the struggle by home from Ireland and especially the extraordinary events yesterday when many police, who for months have been attacking demonstrators, instead joined the demonstrations.  Presumably they will soon be bought off and return to business as usual but all the same perhaps such an usual event is close to a miracle.

The cracks beneath the surface in the peace process were once again exposed on the streets of East Belfast last night in the second night of serious sectarian rioting. A UVF led mob numbering in the 100's has been engaged in attacks on catholic homes at the edge of the Short Strand.  This is the reality of a peace dividend which has failed to deliver to working-class communities and stands in stark contrast to suburbia only 5 miles away which produced golf champion Rory McElroy.