Large areas of Leitrim and Clare are under options licenses for onshore Shale Gas extraction using destructive and invasive technology, including hydraulic fracturing.

What is less well known is that large areas of Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon are also licensed for Lignite extraction, which in simple terms is Coal Bed Methane/Coal Seam Gasification, with an even greater environmental and human health impact than shale gas extraction. read full story / add a comment

I hereby reveal the following copy due for publication in one of Britain's papers today, but which was suppressed by the editors 'for security reasons'. read full story / add a comment

HeadSpace is a writing and art magazine based around mental health. The magazine features deeply moving personal accounts, spectacular creative writing, and thought-provoking art dealing with the panic and confusion that comes with mental health difficulties and stories of hope and recovery. Issue One will be launched on May 11 to be distributed for free to psychiatric wards and support centres. Copies will also be made available for general purchase, with sales revenue being used to provide more free copies to support centres for people undergoing mental health difficulties. The magazine is entirely not-for-profit and was created by a group of volunteers. Issue One is now available for advance orders online at http://headspacemagazine.bigcartel.com/ for €5 including delivery. For more information please visit www.facebook.com/HeadSpaceForAll. To donate and receive some fantastic perks in return, visit the HeadSpace Indiegogo campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/headspace-magazine--3...69728. read full story / add a comment

The central bank is planning changes to the Code of Protection on mortgage arrears, these changes will mean it will be easier for people to be counted as non co-operating and thus make repossession easier, please send the submission below to code@centralbank.ie or make your own submission and send before April 10th to ensure your opposition to this is taken into consideration, with 95,000 people in arrears because of this banking led recession, the people who are bailing out the banks need fairness, there is nothing fair in all powers of discretion, supervision and appeals being with the banks who will not consider the good of the person or common good of the country. read full story / add a comment

19th, 20th, 21st April
Venue: 27 Pearse Street, Dublin 2 - The Pearse Centre read full story / add a comment

22nd, 23rd, 24th April
Venue: An Droichead, 20 Cooke Street, Belfast BT7 2EP read full story / add a comment

What is a day in the life of people living in Ireland today? If we're lucky we awake to the stress of travelling to work, breakfast and getting the children ready for school. What of those who do not have this luck? read full story / add a comment

The EU bailout in Cyprus seems, on the surface to have taken on board some good ideas such as burning bondholders, capital flight controls, and much more limited small depositors state bank guarantee scheme, but does this stand up to closer inspection or have they just used these good ideas in a rather twisted way to further the same old financial terrorist agendas? read full story / add a comment

I know various parts of Britain are hosting gatherings to remember the dark legacy of Maggies reign but I think that in Dublin we should all come together tonight on O Connell Street to collectively remember all effected by the woman, particularly the hunger strikers, shoot to kill victims, Argentines, miners the list goes on. SO just throwing it out there and open to suggestions but this occassion should not pass with out challenging the message that Thatcher represented. Needless to say the media will be quick to have revised sanitised versions of her life being beamed over the airwaves. read full story / add a comment

Chomsky spent an inordinate amount of time on climate change, in Dublin, which a small part of environmental damage, resulting from the current unregulated greed of capitalism, without any sense of social responsibility particularly in contemporary Ireland. read full story / add a comment

A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years ago.

A virtually infinite number of life forms exist. In the sophisticated work of the world’s most eminent scientists the idea has already been conceived of reproducing the sounds which followed the Big Bang, the great explosion which took place more than 13.7 billion years ago.

This introduction would be too extensive if it was not to explain the gravity of an event as unbelievable and absurd as the situation created in the Korean Peninsula, within a geographic area containing close to five billion of the seven billion persons currently inhabiting the planet. read full story / add a comment

The AP has revised its stylebook to no longer include the term Islamist. They explain why:
"Islamist” is frequently used as a label for conservative Islamic political movements, particularly Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood . It generally carries a negative connotation"

Has the AP thought that maybe it carries a negative connotation because fascistic movements – religious or otherwise – generally do?

The disgusting Council on American-Islamic Relations which has previously lobbied AP to drop the term because they say it ”has become shorthand for ‘Muslims we don’t like’” and “is currently used in an almost exclusively pejorative context” is elated: We believe this revision is a step in the right direction and will result in fewer negative generalizations in coverage of issues related to Islam and Muslims."

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Akbayan Partylist today called on President Benigno Simeon Aquino III to "shake the military establishment" and "weed out the corrupt, murderers and traitors" among its ranks. The partylist group made the call after the Court of Appeals' decision to hold elements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) accountable for the enforced disappearance of Jonas Burgos in 2007.
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The IRELAND-PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN presents:

MIKO PELED, Israeli activist and author of The General’s Son

3pm, Sat 13th April, Gresham Metropole Hotel, McCurtain St, Cork City

Don’t miss this unique oppurtunity to hear firsthand from an Israeli activist for freedom, justice and equality in Palestine and Israel. Copies of his book will be avaialble for purchase and signing on the night. read full story / add a comment

On Sat April 13th the EU Ministers of Finance are assembled in Dublin Castle. Join the National Protest to Stop Property Tax Robbery Assemble 12:30 Garden of Remembrance / Parnell Square to march to Dublin castle #ResistTheRobbery #A13 read full story / add a comment

Weekly Worker issue 956 - April 04 2013

Welfare cuts: Housing should be a basic human right
The cuts to housing benefit are cruel and irrational, says Michael Copestake

Anti-cuts movement: Frontism produces no lasting gains
What can we expect from the People’s Assembly? Dave Isaacson looks at the June 22 build-up

South African left: Attempt to go round already existing mass organisations
Wasp might be able to sting the SACP/Cosatu bureaucracy. But, asks Peter Manson, can it become a mass party capable of leading a socialist revolution? read full story / add a comment

Eddie Ford doesn't like Kim or the bizarre North Korean regime but he looks behind the headlines to examine how the US is stirring things up. Full story at url.

Over the last week there has been a considerable escalation of tensions between North and South Korea. To some degree, of course, this is ‘business as usual’ rhetoric, eg, Pyongyang on March 31 declared that it was in a “state of war” with Seoul (actually that has been the case since the 1953 armistice). But there is more going on than heightened rhetoric - though so far, thankfully, not a single missile has been fired.

Now, I am no admirer of the North Korean regime. It is a brutal and very odd Stalinist dictatorship, which quite literally deifies its leaders - whether the current tyrant, the Great Successor, Kim Jong-un, or his grandfather and Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, the “eternal president” who died in 1994 and presumably still guides the nation, albeit in his new, other-worldly form. To think that such a repressive system could be a workers’ state of any kind, deformed or otherwise, is a grotesque abnegation of genuine socialist politics. read full story / add a comment

Link to a wsws review by Joanne Laurie of a new Israelii documentary: The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh.

The newly released film –directed by Dror Moreh., a former election ad maker for Ariel Sharon - largely consists of interviews with former heads of Shin Bet , the notorious Israeli intelligence service . According to Laurier , The Gatekeepers “ provides a glimpse into the crisis wracking Israeli society and the failing Zionist project.”
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Hi All:

As of last Thursday ( March 28th 2013 ) FAS funding for the DBD Jobs Club, in Bawnogue ( Clondalkin ) has been withdrawn completely without any satisfactory explanation.

The Jobs Club Leader has been told that he is about to be made redundant and all services from our Jobs Club is to be withdrawn immediately.

Over the last 10 years, The Jobs Club has provided a very valuable service to local jobseekers over and it is unthinkable that, when its needed most, the area will be deprived of this valuable service. read full story / add a comment

The Dublin anarchist bookfair returns to Liberty Hall on the 6th of April for our 8th annual edition, and the theme 1913-2013 - Rebuilding a Movement from Below. There will be a social in Seomra Spraoi on the 5th and a radical walking tour around Dublin on the 7th. read full story / add a comment