History & Anniversaries – Ireland

Fifty years ago, this week a “strike” was called by the Ulster Workers Council (UWC)  – a coalition of loyalist paramilitary groups, backed by some unionist politicians, like Ian Paisley – in Northern Ireland, in […]

The Omagh bomb of 25 years ago was the end of any significant republican armed campaign in Ireland or elsewhere. The backlash ruled such out for many years. The Omagh bombing was one of the […]

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, available on BBC iPlayer, is one of the outstanding documentaries on the conflict in Northern Ireland that is euphemistically known as the ‘Troubles’. Rather than an overarching narrative, […]

And why it has not overcome sectarian divisions On the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, Niall Mulholland explains the origins of the ‘peace process’, and why the fundamental problems underpinning […]

The video link below features Carmel Gates, General Secretary of the Nothern Ireland Public Services Alliance (personal capacity) – the largest trade union in the North of Ireland – and a Militant Left (CWI Ireland) […]

 Bloody Counter-Revolution Carried Through Today, 6 December, marks the formal centenary of the creation of the ‘Free State’ in Ireland, comprising 26 of the 32 counties on the island, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty. One of […]

This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the ‘civil war’ in Ireland, which saw the final stages of an extraordinary decade of social and national revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements. A split among […]

The Struggle for Justice Continues Half a century has passed since the British Army shot 28 peaceful civil rights demonstrators on January 30, 1972, in Derry city, Northern Ireland. Thirteen innocent people were killed in […]

“In the 12 weeks since the [British] Heath and [N Ireland] Faulkner governments introduced internment, the cities and towns of Northern Ireland have become battlefields. This vicious sectarian measure has mobilised huge sections of the […]

“A carnival of reaction” Today, 3 May 2021, is officially marked as the hundredth anniversary of the creation of Northern Ireland. With sectarian tensions rising once again, the real history of the tumultuous decades leading […]

Fifty years ago this month, troops were deployed on the streets of Derry and Belfast by the British Labour government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson.The capitalist establishment described it at the time as a temporary […]

The tenth of April 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in Belfast. This was the formal ending of the ‘Troubles’, the euphemism for decades of sectarian upheaval […]