CYM Committee

The Community Action Tenants Union – An Organisation of People’s Power

“The idea of CATU is a union outside of the workplace. An organisation that is built by the community to organise and fight for the community’s interests. The scope is extremely large. Primarily, CATU is involved in the housing struggle because it believes that real power lies in the hands of ordinary people when they unite together to defend their interests against those that exploit our communities and turn housing into a mere commodity. Ordinary people, organised, united, and standing ready to fight for their interests scares the living daylights out of exploiters and those who take their trust for granted. The statement that real power lies in the hands of ordinary people is entirely correct.”

The Ugly Game; the Rotten Side of Homophobia and Racism in Football

Football, or as it’s known here, soccer, is known as “the beautiful game”. A sport that unites young and old! But the truth is that football does anything but unite, it separates men from women, white people from people of colour, homosexual people from heterosexual people. It isn’t just the far-right leaning section of fans either, this is deeply ingrained in the history of the sport with its governing bodies such as FIFA and UEFA.

Imperialism Is On Your Plate

When the word imperialism is evoked, it seems strange to equivocate the term with a contemporary form of food production and this is what makes modern imperialism so effective. That is its ability to remain invisible or to go undetected. For the modern superpowers, and in the era of Pax Americana, this is largely how they operate, by using less direct methods in order to advance their nation’s particular geopolitical interests and to disguise these actions by using modern political or economic jargon such as “development”, “liberalisation” or “investment”.

Hammer & Sickle, Spears & Sickness

So as long as Britney Spears remains “sick” in the eyes of the public, her conservatorship will continue under the guise of protection – not sick enough to cease work but too sick to have any agency. It is at this point where capitalism and disability justice intersect, where Britney is stripped of all control whilst simultaneously denied effective care.

Double Standards on Detention: Belarus and Ireland

What should be bizarre to any political commentator or follower in Ireland is why elected representatives here have little to nothing to say about the Special Criminal Court. Why do they not reach out to Republican political prisoners convicted under questionable standards and attempt to help them? I think that the answer is relatively simple. Maintaining double standards is a regular theme among representatives of the ruling class, so whilst many of our own elected representatives have a lot to say about what is happening in Belarus and the justice system there, they remain silent about events here.

The Lion, The Bitch, and Leftist Men

“This “White Knight” syndrome that runs rampant throughout leftist spaces is ridiculous and it needs to stop. Women and misogyny-affected people have come to expect misogyny from the right, yet when it comes from the left, from men they trust and call comrades, it is a painful reminder of how patriarchy and internalised misogyny is virtually inescapable”.