News 2009

The Connolly Association delivered letters to the Irish Ambassador in London and No 10 Downing Street praising the Irish constitution for allowing for a referendum on the Lisbon constitutional treaty and urging prime minister Gordon Brown to reconsider his government's position not to hold a vote in Britain

Ken Keable points out the hypocrisy surrounding the demand for Libya to compensate the IRA’s victims

Jim McConalogue of the European Foundation argues that the EU summit strategy dealing with Ireland’s referendum was little more than a cover-up for getting round the previous No vote

Donal Kennedy continues his Dissing the Famous series, directing his fire this time at the Irish journalist Fergal Keane

Statement made by Irish-American Labor Coalition president Joe Jamison to the Conference on United Ireland held at the 
Hilton Hotel, New York on 13 June 2009

Donal Kennedy continues to lament the death of the actor Dermot Morgan, whose portrayal of the venal priest Ted Crilly in the Father Ted series lives on in the annals of television comedy history

Theo Russell reports on a meeting in London at which Sinn Féin's Pat Doherty spoke on the theme of'Ireland and Britain after 2010' and the British launch of a new Sinn Féin Irish unity initiative

Pangloss muses on the arrest of Lt.Col. Owen McNally in Kabul in an age when technological advances have meant that we no longer need we live in ignorance of how our fellow men, women and children live, or die.

Statement issued by the Connolly Association on 18 June 2009 in response to decommissioning moves by loyalist paramilitaries.

Donal Kennedy argues that publications like the Irish Democrat can still play a vital role in challenging the lies and distortions of the media on both sides of the Irish Sea

Donal Kennedy continues his ‘Dissing the Famouus’ column with a swipe the right-wing, anti-Irish republican journalist Kevin Myers

Donal Kennedy takes issue with those commentators who view the main characteristic of Christian Brothers educators as a penchant for personal violence and its approval for nationalist ends

Donal Kennedy advocates the sacking of Labour's Northern Ireland secretary Shaun Woodward

The Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) welcomes the publication of a major international report by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) on counter-terrorism and human rights. The report draws heavily on the organisation's own findings published in 2008

David Granville explains why recent developments involving both the Conservative Party and the British Labour Party could harm the reconciliation process in Northern Ireland

David Granville examines the latest developments in Sinn Féin's efforts to forge a progressive alliance of the left in Ireland

In the second of his new series ‘Dissing the famous’ Irish Democrat correspondent takes aim at the London Times

Citizen Smith recounts a chance encounter with a fellow Irishman outside the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square

David Granville warns that Britain's response to the threat posed by ‘dissident’ republicans is both anti-democratic and a potential threat to the Good Friday process

Donal Kennedy begins a new series in which he takes aim at leading figures on both sides of the Irish Sea, exposing hypocrisy and humbug along the way. He begins the series with Gay Mitchell MEP

Mary Pearson of the Troops Out Movement reports on the recent visit of relatives of two of the 11 innocent and unarmed civilians killed by the British army during the first three days of internment in 1971

Donal Kennedy points out that the enemies of Irish democracy from the time of Wolfe Tone to the present have been both persistent and plentiful

The 12th of February 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the murder by loyalist gunmen, working in collusion with British security forces, of the Belfast human-rights solicitor Patrick Finucane, David Granville explains why the Finucane family and human-rights campaigners continue to demand an independent inquiry

Father and son Al and Ruan O'Donnell, the former an Irish folk legend, the latter one of Ireland's most prominent historians, are set to educate and entertain Irish festival goers in Sheffield on Monday 16th March

Connolly Association press statement on issued on Monday 9 March 2009 on the deployment of the British army Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) and the attack on the British army barracks in Antrim on Sunday 8 March

Citizen Smith comments on a campaign that has been developing in Dublin to hasten a state visit by the British monarch

Robert Griffiths and others pay their respects to the Irish patriot, Communist and international brigader who died recently

British human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has recently written to the Irish justice minister Dermor Ahern calling upon him to support the repatriation of republican prisoner Nope Maguire, convicted in 2003 of involvement in a real IRA bombing campaign in England

Donal Kennedy writes in concerning Ruairi O Domhnaill's review of ‘John Redmond – the Parnellite’

Over 145 Irish academics today issued a call for the EU to cut links with Israel. We publish the story here along with their letter to the Irish Times

David Granville believes it's time for progressives and democrats in Britain to start talking about Irish politics again

David Granville argues that Channel 4's recent censorship of a rendition of ‘The Fields of Athenry’ highlights both the muddle-headed thinking behind some recent attempts to combat sectarianism in Scotland and demonstrates a worrying trend towards the censorship of songs with political content

Domhnall O'Cinneide explains how shoddy journalism, political bias and deliberate misinformation get dressed up as indisputable ‘fact’ in the columns of the British press and can take on a life of their own

Domhnall O’Cinneide pays tribute to campaigning Irish journalist Breandan MacLua who died earlier this month