The alt-right have just carried out an ISIS style attack on anti-fascist protesters in Virgina killing at least one person and wounding 19.  In the video you will see the car accelerating at speed down an empty street into protesters that are 50m away at an intersection, it ploughs into them without slowing down.  Towards the end of the video the car can be seen reversing back up the street at speed with its front bumper hanging off.  At that point it has hit people and other static cars, pushing them forward into yet more people 

Video of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home. pic.twitter.com/MUOZs71Pf4

— Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) August 12, 2017

THE JOBSTOWN SIX have been found NOT GUILTY - a disastrous outcome for the Labour party and Garda in what has been the biggest political show trial for some decades. It is impossible to have followed the details of the arrests and trial and walk away with the impression that the Garda were not acting on government instructions, even if just on the basis of the ‘nod and a wink’. The verdict may well catch anyone relying on the mainstream media as a surprise because right across that media the reporting of the trial was highly selective, reflecting the interests of those who own and control it.

*** A summary for anyone following this from outside Ireland, six men were on trial accused of falsely imprisoning the then Tanáiste and Labour TD, Joan Burton, and her colleague in Jobstown on 15 November 2014. The charge of false imprisonment carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. All six men claimed that they were exercising their right to protest, and that the protest was peaceful. Following a nine week trial, the six have been found not guilty. ***

The end of May 2017 saw the start of an unusually broad debate take place within and around the Irish far left and left feminist movement. As with almost all discussions now most of it took place online although it did also include articles in national newspapers. I’d a conversation with activists friends who hadn’t followed the discussions out of which I realised it was a bit hard to understand the heat of the argument without understanding its development. So I prepared a timeline of it, what is below is a modified version of what I first posted on my Facebook profile, some of the Twitter debate, and my side of some of the discussions that generated in turn.

Mayday 2017 saw the annual Dublin Council of Trade Unions (DCTU) organised march through Dublin. The theme of the march was the struggle for housing, with it being led off by housing action groups including the Irish Housing Network. Other campaign groups on the march included Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, Abortion Rights Campaign, Sex Workers Alliance and a range of other campaign groups, unions and left groups. There was also a sizeable anarchist bloc bringing up the rear with a banner that used the James Connolly quotation 'Our demands are most moderate, we only want the Earth'.

My footage of the Working Class Queeroes bloc on Dublin Pride 2017 including the banner drop before Pride and the bloc smoking up the rainbow flag prior to crossing the river Liffey.

With at least 12 confirmed dead at the London towerblock fire this morning (14th June) it has emerged that repeated warnings to the landlord and council of a fire hazard were ignored.  Early reports indicate that tower was home to 120 families, many drawn from poor migrant communities. 

The Grenfell Action Group this morning posted "we have posted numerous warnings in recent years about the very poor fire safety standards at Grenfell Tower and elsewhere in RBKC." - they had previously called KCTMO "an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia" in their blog where 8 warnings about this tower had been posted.

Protests took place across Ireland Saturday 22nd April to protest the plan by Health Simon Harris to give the new maternity hospital, which will cost 300 million to build, to the same nuns who ran the Magdeline laundaries!  The Sisters of Charity ran the Drumcondra and Sean MacDermott Street laundaries where expectant and recent mothers were essentially imprisoned and required to provide free labour that the numns profited from.

The Saturday before the start of the show trial of the 7 adults accused of the 'false imprisonment' of then Labour Leader Joan Burton at Jobstown a solidarity rally took place in the centre of Dublin.

March 8th 2017 and International Womens Day sees an enormous mobilisation in Dublin to demand repeal of the eight amendment to the Irish  Constitution.  Thousands of people blocked O’Connell street bridge as part of #Strike4Repeal and then in the evening 11,000 marched on the Dail.

The packed in nature of the #Strike4Repeal on O'Connell bridge made it impossible to do an actual count. So we've done the next best thing, used the area occupied to calculate how many people could have fitted into the space photos show was occupied. We also did the same thing for the later #March4Repeal

In both cases we used a crowd counting app that allows you to draw out an area and then calculates how many people fit into that area. With the bridge its complicated because the centre of the bridge is under reconstruction and was sealed off behind fences. So the simple method we used above was to calculate how many people fitted into that area and subtract that from how many people would have fitted if it was also accessible. This tells us that at peak crowd, a little after 13.00, up to 8,000 people turned out for #strike4repeal