From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
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Decades of church and state repression of women
The COMMUNIST PARTY of IRELAND on the release of a report into the deaths of 9,000 children in institutions for unmarried mothers and their babies
POIGNANT: Protesters wear baby shoes, to signify the children who died in mother and baby homes in Ireland
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The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
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A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
THE publication of the report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, cataloguing the horrendous abuse and exploitation handed out to tens of thousands of women over the decades by religious institutions — of both main religious faiths — lays bare the violence and repressive attitudes that have been inflicted on women in general here in Ireland.
Those forces that secured their victory and established the Irish Free State were more than willing to hand over many critical services that the people needed to religious orders, including health and education and much more, creating a culture of dependence and fear.
The state and the Establishment parties of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail built a close relationship with the Catholic Church in particular to ensure the social and political stability of the state and to maintain the economic and political status quo.
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