Posted in Irish Labour History on Oct 23rd, 2008 5 Comments »
Irritatingly, I missed the excellent TG4 documentary Soviet na hÉireann last night on the soviets in Ireland. According to the TG4 listing:
Soviet na hÉireann explores that heady post World War 1 era when Ireland stood on the brink of a Soviet socialist revolution which would have utterly altered the course of its history.
Heady? The notion […]
Posted in Irish Middle Class, Marx, dublin, Irish social history, Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History on Sep 30th, 2008 15 Comments »
Night is gone, a dawn
comes up in birds and sounds of the city.
There will be light
to live by, things
to see: my eyes will lift
to where the sun in vermilion sits,
and I will love thee and have pity. (Michael Hartnett)
I’m sitting on the small fenced stone wall that surrounds the central bank on Dame Street, drinking […]
Posted in Irish Middle Class, Marx, Irish Society, Irish social history, Irish History, Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History on Sep 11th, 2008 1 Comment »
I’m standing at the corner of Cathal Brugha Street and Thomas Lane, waiting for my friend Lida to arrive. She’s starting up her own business soon, and wants me to write a blurb for the website. The buses are running a bit late but she gets here around 6.30pm and so we head off for […]
Posted in Irish Middle Class, Marx, Irish Society, Irish social history, Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History on Sep 4th, 2008 6 Comments »
It is not the poverty
Of soil in Leitrim that makes me raise my hat
To fools with fifty pounds in a paper bank” (Lough Derg, Kavanagh)
A friend of mine is fond of saying, “he who tires of Bray, tires of life”. And there’s more than a line of truth in that one. As for myself, today […]
Posted in Irish Economy, Irish social history, Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History on Jul 28th, 2008 4 Comments »
In the Saorstát there is a very large internal trade in cattle, the 13 central eastern counties importing great herds of calves and store cattle from the seven south-western and from the six north-western counties. Before describing this trade it will be helpful to obtain an accurate impression of the ages of the calves and […]
Posted in Irish social history, Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History on Jul 22nd, 2008 No Comments »
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I have a two-month summer teaching contract, after which I’ll be visiting my post office on a weekly basis. At the same time I’m trying to get some research done, and so I’m snapping up stuff in the library after classes, and mulling over it as I walk […]
Posted in Irish social history, Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History on Jul 20th, 2008 2 Comments »
A couple of months back I was putting together a research proposal that would look at the social, economic, cultural life and kinship of an ordinary housing estate in Dublin, from its planning inception in the 1950s through to the start of the “Celtic Tiger” boom in the early 1990s. The idea is to collate […]
Posted in Irish social history, Irish working Class Culture, Irish Labour History on Jun 4th, 2008 12 Comments »
the expression ‘working classes’ shall include mechanics, artizans, labourers, and others working for wages, hawkers, costermongers, persons not working for wages, but working at some trade or handicraft without employing others except members of their own family; and persons, other than domestic servants, whose income in any case does not exceed an average of 60/- […]
Posted in Irish Working Class, Irish Labour History, Labour on Apr 3rd, 2008 No Comments »
I was going through some old files on my hard drive and came across these scans of letters from Connolly that I had picked up a couple of years ago. They relate to his time in New York. The first letter is dated 28 January 1907, the last one, 6 June 1910.
For more on […]
Posted in Zaragoza, Irish social history, Irish Labour History, Spain on Mar 13th, 2008 6 Comments »
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass (”And the days are not enough,” Ezra Pound)
It’s 3.14am and I’m sipping coffee in the arrivals lounge in Barcelona airport. The only bulls are the ones on the Osborne port bottles […]