Socialist Voice Review
September 2026
We start this review with an apology. It is a long piece and could and should be much longer, given the amount of material we have been given to work with. As a consequence, we have to defer comment on some articles and only touch on some others.
The first reading of this issue of Socialist Voice raised concerns that we were being led into an ambush in view of the number of elementary and avoidable traps laid out by many of the contributors.
A second reading reassured us that any signs of possible hostile intent were just the sounds of their own carelessly laid landmines going off under their feet.
Final paragraph syndrome
While a great deal of the content of various articles is informative if mostly standard fare, the closing paragraphs reveal the abysmal lack of direction or strategy. Worse still, this public exposure of their political naivety shows there is no hint the contributors have any appreciation that critical thinkers might apply objective reasoning to their material and judge its merits, or otherwise, accordingly.
Up first, Jimmy Corcoran, General Secretary. In Illusions No Longer Holding the People Enthralled! Corcoran deals with issues of democracy under capitalism, its failures to “respond to the needs and demands of the people”, and how once a government has been formed it becomes an “elective dictatorship”.
Criticising capitalism and its operations is easy. However, Corcoran is the general secretary of a political party that has never managed to enthral any significant number of people and which is now going backwards faster than ever before but it is his last line that opens him up to scrutiny: “Real politics take place not in parliaments but, as Marx said, in “the rude external world”.
In the rude external world Corcoran stands accused of very serious offences against the democracy enshrined in the constitution of the party itself, of direct involvement in secret trials under arbitrary conditions of large numbers of members of his party, of being the general secretary of an elected dictatorship known as the National Executive Committee and of refusing to correct or repudiate those actions. In the rude external world, he has never denied or defended his actions.
In the rude external world of politics, Corcoran is a lightening-rod for adverse attention making him a liability not just to the CPI but to socialism and to any prospects of working-class organisation and progress.
Eugene McCartan is at it again in Ireland: the Poster Boy for NATO. “The battle to protect the Triple Lock is not over – no matter what the Government forces through the Dáil, the battle will continue”. And “…. we need to continue to build the pressure on the government….”
How is this to be achieved and what contribution will the CPI make to achieving it? How would a reader of Socialist Voice know where to go next to get involved? How many times do these questions have to be asked before McCartan enlightens us with his wisdom?
Tommy McKearney deals with the importance of history and more importantly, who writes the history, Manufacturing Your Consent. Referring to the failed political entity that is the north of Ireland, McKearney concluded that “An accurate assessment of the reality that is a failed political entity is essential.” Indeed, it is. Unless the CPI is able to look into itself critically and immediately, it will never be able to avoid the tag of being a failed political entity itself. Many believe it has already achieved that status but we live in hope – for a little bit longer – that it will start to pull back from the brink.
In The Irish People Are Right, Well Left Actually! Nicola Lawlor asks: “So, what should a Communist Party do? Continue to develop our clear and up-to-date positions on these issues and take every opportunity for the Party to articulate our position on these popular points within the organised working class”.
Let’s take a step back here. What are the clear and up to date positions? At least, some of the “clear and up-to-date positions on these issues” were decided at the party National Congress at the end of April. It is now almost five months since the party’s political programme – Peace, Independence and Socialism – was agreed yet these was still no sign of it in Socialist Voice or on the party website at the time this article was published.
Trivial?
Avoidable errors in one or two articles could escape critical attention but multiple and repeated errors become impossible to ignore.
All these issues might appear trivial except for the added complication that the party has exposed itself to adverse public scrutiny and examination of its operations. Now, in addition to unanswered questions about its recent murky history, it continues to publicly display just how amateur its presentation is with its enduring lack of clarity, direction, organisation, political savvy or of alertness to any necessity to display a positive and professional image.
In Squeaky Clean? (May 2024) we stated: “For a communist party to be able to even start taking on the task of promoting and convincing people of the merits of socialism, it first must be squeaky clean. Otherwise, the arguments will be lost in a haze of organised diversions generated by its opponents.
“In the normal course of events, a barrage of lies and disinformation will be generated to create a different focus from the message a communist party is trying to get out and get accepted. This can be very difficult to deal with even if the party starts from a squeaky-clean position.
“However, if that party presents real and provable evidence of its shortcomings to its opponents, it stands no chance of getting anywhere. If those instances of malfunction are long-standing, uncorrected or defended, then such a party is doomed. The problem is not so much that a particular party is doomed, the problem is that the working class who depended on that party is doomed. That’s an entirely different matter but that is how high the stakes are.”
The China paradox
Gearóid Ó Machail is back on his hobby-horse with Lenin’s Warning: Eurocentrism and the New “Left-Wing” Infantilism. This article needs serious and separate analysis and we will return to this another time. The basis of his proposition – apart from making more questionable claims about China – is that people who question the direction that China has taken are engaging in “ ‘Left-wing’ infantilism” and that “This attitude is not only a betrayal of Lenin’s teachings but a fundamental abandonment of historical materialism”.
Don’t you just love a clean, objective debate? Our contention that the CPI resorts to bullyboy tactics to get its way – internally and externally – continues to run just as we have often described.
In our August SV Review we asked: “since when did aligning with an evolving and deeply contradictory social system whose future development and eventual orientation is necessarily unclear, become an acceptable political strategy?” We will resume on the same theme.
In contrast, Pól Mac Phádraig, International Secretary of the CPI, displayed an objective and (eventually) a non-deferential position at the 24th International Meeting of Communist & Workers’ Parties in Havana addressing the issue of international solidarity: “So we say this: We have the greatest respect for the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government. We recognise the substantial aid that China has given to Cuba – ships containing rice and solar equipment.
But – we plead with you now: send the one thing that Cuba is desperate for and is in your capacity to deliver.
Send ships of oil!
Send them now!”
Pots and pans
Eoghan O’Neill continues his series on the politics of power discussing The Hierarchy of Rights. His first part asked what makes rights and freedoms real. This article examines what happens when they come into conflict.
“When ………. purposes conflict, a wider hierarchy of rights becomes visible. Both can make claims in the language of rights, yet they do not enter the conflict from equal positions.
“The previous article argued that rights and freedoms become real only when sufficient power exists to establish and defend them. But rights can also conflict. When they do, whose rights prevail?
“Capitalist society presents individuals as formally equal before the law”.
So does the CPI Constitution in relation to the rights and expectations of party members. Perhaps when O’Neill has completed his current study, he might analyse the politics of power as exercised within the CPI? If Socialist Voice declines to publish it he can be assured that Guerrilla Communists will.
CPI Website
In a recent statement, Do not ignore the root causes of the cost of living crisis! the CPI managed to say very little of substance while once again offering the targeted audience nothing at all in terms of practical arrangements towards securing the desired outcome.
“We must stand up for peace, negotiated settlement of conflicts, and an end to imperialist wars. This matters to your pocket. We must also demand the root causes of climate change be addressed and a just transition for workers that does not make workers pay for the pollution of big business.”
And much more decisively,
“Working people need to move beyond passively seeing war and climate change as issues to be left to the political class and technocrats; they should be mobilised industrially and politically as best they can for a better society.”
Of course, they should. Now look at the website: there isn’t even a pretence at organising the mobilisation it has just called for and no hint as to how the CPI might assist other organisations or individuals in promoting or developing such a movement.
“Working people need to move beyond passively….” Its the CPI that needs to move beyond passively issuing ‘must’ diktats: repeat often – we must, we must, we must, we must improve our musts.
How or why does the CPI allow itself to be exposed so easily? The website has nothing to offer except occasional commentary and its documents are still out of date. At the time that statement was published, the CPI had not published its party programme – a full three months after it was agreed at its congress at the end of April. We have seen the document and it is no great shakes, (that is for another day) but that is not the point. Anyone looking at the website for inspiration will have to settle for the party programme that was agreed in 2022.
Even more musts
In a CPI Statement on the Latest Attacks on Irish Neutrality, we are treated to more of the same:
“We must fight to save the Triple Lock, to save the last protection stopping us becoming fully integrated into the US-led imperialist war machine. We must organise to take back power from the capitalist class whose interest is advanced at every turn by the immiseration and early death of the working people of Ireland.”
This is not serious politics. Indeed, it is more embarrassing than that: it is a public exposure of the ineffectiveness of the CPI as both a political and organisational participant in the mobilisation of the working class.
They make communists appear as harmless and pathetic observers, always ready to talk down to anyone who crosses their path. In that respect, the party has never changed.
As the self-declared leading thinkers, “The Communist Party of Ireland is a voluntary organisation of the most politically advanced members of the working-class ….” the CPI has such an elevated opinion of itself that it has never understood the need to lower itself to actual working-class struggle.
Tell them what to do, ‘but no need to develop plans or strategies on how to do it, has always been the operational prerogative of the CPI.
That was true even when the party was mainly made up of working-class members. Today, mostly made up of middle-class ‘communist’ adventurers, the self-declared superiority infects their operation even more.
Less theorising and a little more common people-like understanding of working-class life might be in order – if only to teach these adventurers what fate has in store for them:
But still you’ll never get it right
‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all
Yeah
Sing along with the common people
Sing along and it might just get you through
Laugh along with the common people
Laugh along, even though they’re laughing at you
And the stupid things that you do
Because you think that poor is cool
Like a dog lying in a corner
They will bite you and never warn you
Look out, they’ll tear your insides out
‘Cause everybody hates a tourist…..