By International Socialist Alternative (ISA) Women’s Bureau (ISA is the international socialist organisation to which the Socialist Party is the Irish section of) The covid-19 crisis has hit the world hard. Health care workers, whose voices were never heard when they screamed for more staff and resources in movements and strikes all over the world in the last years, are ...

By Keishia Taylor The 1918-1919 “Spanish Flu” killed between 50-100 million people, more than the number of deaths in the First and Second World Wars combined. According to expert Laura Spinney the Spanish flu “re-sculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death.” The war plague The influenza epidemic began in the spring of 1918, quickly spreading throughout ...

By Andrea Murray Covid-19 has plunged the world into a situation of unparalleled uncertainty and anxiety, for none more so than those already suffering from the housing crisis. In January this year, there were officially 10,271 homeless people in Ireland. The number of homeless families had increased by 302% to 1,611 since 2015. More than one in three people in ...

By Dean O’Donnell 2020 got off to an alarming start with the US government assasination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. An act of imperialist aggression and the result of escalating tensions between both states, it posed a  direct threat of war in the Middle East — a reminder of the deeply unstable period we are currently living through. Now, not ...

By Mick Barry TD On Weds 25 March 1,000 workers at Moy Park Portadown walked off the job demanding proper health and safety protections for the workforce. The same day nearly 100 workers at a Larry Goodman meat plant – ABP in Lurgan – did the same thing for the same reason. On Friday 27 March workers at Linden Meats ...

“The shock to the global economy from COVID-19 has been both faster and more severe than… even the Great Depression.” That comment by economist Nouriel Roubini on 24th March indicates the growing possibility of global events entering an entirely new period. One way to prepare is to study and draw lessons from the 1930s. By Per-Ake Westerlund, Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (our ...

By Niamh Brannelly How has COVID-19 spread so far and so fast? Catastrophes are not caused by a single event, but rather a chain of events, in this case linked to the type of society we live in where profit is put before the needs of people. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. This article follows this chain of events ...

Guiliano Bruneti – member of the Socialist Party’s sister group in Italy, Resistenze Internazionali – spoke in an online meeting last Saturday, organised by Ruth Coppinger, and gave a firsthand account of the spread of Covid19 in Italy. He spoke of the efforts by the boss class to keep production going, particularly in manufacturing, thus jeopardising the health of workers. ...

By Aislinn O’Keefe According to a 2018 OECD survey, one in six people across Europe are living with a mental health problem, and more than 50% of people will experience mental health issues over the course of their lifetimes. Of the 36 countries surveyed, Ireland ranked joint third for the most instances of mental illness in the country. In Ireland, ...

By Thomas White  In what should be positive news it looks like Remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed in the wake of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, could be used to help treat patients with severe cases of Covid-19. The drug has not been proven to be a cure, but it can alleviate the worst effects of the disease. Remdesivir was developed ...