Moore Street – Rising to our Future

The campaign to save the 1916 Moore Street Battlefield site and those iconic buildings and streetscape that are forever linked to the most important historic event in modern Irish history has reached another potentially decisive moment.

In May, An Taoiseach Simon Harris announced the establishment of “a Taskforce to take a holistic view of the measures required to rejuvenate Dublin City Centre, north and south”. The stated objective is to make Dublin City Centre “a more thriving, attractive, and safe cityscape; and a desirable location to live, work, do business and visit.” The Taskforce is expected to report this month (August).

International solidarity needed to end Israel’s genocidal war

By the end of this week more than 40,000 people, mostly children and women, will have been slaughtered by Israel in the Gaza Strip.  The Strip has been reduced to rubble and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been left without shelter, food, clean water and sanitation. This is an Israeli made humanitarian disaster.

Day after day courageous journalists living under constant threat from Israeli snipers, drones and bombs continue to report Israel’s targeted bombing of refugees;  the massacre of families living in tents; and of children starving because Israel is preventing food and medical aid from entering Gaza. In recent days Israeli soldiers deliberately destroyed a water treatment plant in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood of Rafah and an MRI machine at the Turkish hospital in Gaza. This is genocide.

Féile Aris

It is Féile An Phobail time again. Well done to Kevin Gamble and all the Féile team for once again bringing us a truly outstanding Féile programme. There was a time, now receding in memory for many people and never in the memory of countless more who weren’t born in those troubled times, when August,  and the anniversary of Internment, was marked by incursions of British troops and RUC into republican neighbourhoods and  days of rioting and deaths and injuries.

Féile An Phobail has replaced all that. It started following the killing in Gibraltar of three local people, IRA Volunteers Dan McCann, Seán Savage and Mairead Farrell at the behest of Margaret Thatcher in March 1988 and the deaths of others at their funerals. Our community was demonised in a tsunami of invective by the establishment media and our political opponents. Féile was a communal response to that.