Geography Archives: Ireland

“Countries the world over must now urgently follow Ireland’s lead and divest from fossil fuels,” said Gerry Liston at Global Legal Action Network.

THE Che Guevara stamp produced by An Post to mark the 50th anniversary of the Latin American freedom fighter’s murder on 9 October 1967 by CIA-backed Bolivian state forces has sold out its initial 120,000 print run.

This expert has some shocking revelations about @jeremycorbyn‘s past…

“For the first time in my adult life and perhaps for the first time in British history someone I would consider to be a fundamentally decent human being…has a chance of being elected.”

In January 2016, I attended Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain’s past in any meaningful way.  On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and […]

“I don’t know.”  Those words, often repeated 160-odd years ago in the USA, earned the gang of those using them the nickname “Know-Nothing Party.”  Those were no expressions of intellectual modesty; party doings were secret, so members were not supposed to disclose anything about them, but just say, “I don’t know.”   Their patriotic title was […]

For some in other lands and continents Greece may seem distant and marginal, a few narrow peninsulas and scattered archipelagos jutting out of the sea.  Some may vaguely recall school knowledge about it.  “Didn’t some fellow named Prometheus steal fire from the gods?  Or was it Alexander the Great untying some “Gordian knot”?  Or a […]

I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city.  The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]

Next year marks 100 years since the birth of Ewan MacColl.  Born James Henry Miller in Salford on 25th January 1915, he adopted the stage name of Ewan MacColl to acknowledge his proud Scottish heritage. MacColl became a great influence on the folk music scene of the 50s and 60s, best known for songs about […]

Government austerity for the masses (raising taxes and cutting public services) is becoming the issue shaping politics in western Europe, north America, and Japan.  In the US, austerity turned millions away from the polls where before they supported an Obama who promised changes from such policies.  So Republicans will control Congress and conflicts over austerity […]

Running up a down escalator is itself mighty difficult.  Trying to keep your footing both on an up and a down escalator at the same time is simply hard to imagine.  Yet it gives an idea of Germany’s present Ukrainian policy. Soon after Soviet soldiers left East Germany between 1989 and 1994, the newly-unified country […]

Some suggested the German “Word of the Year” should be “whistleblower” — in the Denglish language here breezily called “Neu-Deutsch” (“New German”).  But chosen instead was “GroKo,” headline shorthand for “Grosse Koalition,” a term used constantly during three months of wrangling between Germany’s two biggest parties, once seen as “irreconcilable foes,” to form a nice […]

Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, led by the AKP (Justice and Development Party), has, despite opposition, initiated a road construction project that goes through a forest area located in Ankara’s inner city, which is also property of Middle East Technical University (METU). University students, the University presidency as well as the residents of the neighborhood located right […]

Former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland are two of twenty participants from seven countries that will participate in an international delegation to Syria, May 2-10, 2013.  The purpose of the delegation is to meet with communities affected by the fighting, with a view towards facilitating peace and […]

  Neoliberal austerity in crisis-torn Greece has a significant implication for public health and the environment.  The disturbing reality is that the unbearable cost of heating oil for a large portion of the country’s population has led to an increased use of solid fuel heating.  The smog that has appeared in Athens and other Greek […]

We, the undersigned, who are part of an international civil society increasingly worried about the awful bloodshed of the Syrian people, are supporting a political initiative based on the results of a fact-finding mission which some of our colleagues undertook to Beirut and Damascus in September 2012.  This initiative consists in calling for a delegation […]

In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review.  In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley.  As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values.  Meanwhile, the two […]

A small but moving episode marked the regular annual meeting of the German organization Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 (Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik 1936-1939).  It was the first such meeting without a single veteran; the last volunteer in Germany, Fritz Teppich, died last winter, and none of the tiny, decreasing […]

(For Justin Hero Cassell) I heard a foolish man say the other day that everything of interest on the island of Montserrat can be seen in two days.  I kept my own counsel and did not talk of either his mother or his lineage.  But the truth is this, friend: It takes a week at […]

Alberto Montero Soler: First of all, I have to say that those effects would only manifest themselves in the medium term. To propose an exit from the euro as an immediate solution to the deterioration of living conditions of people would mean to deceive them. We are at a crossroads where peripheral economies can only choose between two evils.