Dundalk Communities United to host socialist conference at An Táin next week
Dundalk Communities United is to host a socialist conference, Left Éire, at An Táin Arts Centre on 6 & 7 June
Left Éire, the second annual socialist conference hosted by Dundalk Communities United, is to take place at An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk next week on 6 & 7 June.
A full programme of events is available to view on the website, lefteire.ie, and on both Dundalk Communities United and Left Éire social media pages.
Across the weekend there will be panel discussions, film screenings, workshops and a social on the Saturday evening in Toale’s featuring the Shamrock Showband, Porter Boys Social Club and Messy Avocado.
The conference hopes to bring people together to learn to work and to understand the political questions of our time from an avowed socialist perspective. Themes across the weekend range from the housing, environmentalism, militarism, feminism, education and culture.
On the panels there will be authors, academics and activists. Dr Matt Cole will open proceedings on the Saturday morning with his new book Unpaid: The Past, Present and Future of Wage Theft.
Unpaid upends conventional wisdom about how we value work, exposing wage theft as one of capitalism’s enduring open secrets. From unpaid overtime and under-the-table jobs to algorithmic exploitation, Dundalk Communities United says there are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them.
Róisín Barrett from The Mary Wallopers will be speaking on a panel titled Trad vs Punk discussing how music relates to and shapes political discourse.
Additionally, Dr Conor McCabe and researcher V'cenza Cirefice will be leading a panel on Theory and Practice for Land Justice. What land-uses are prioritised on the island of Ireland? Who has the right to our natural resources? What are the implications for the island’s ecosystems? How can communities reclaim sovereignty over their local landscapes?
In this discussion on the theory and practice of land-based struggles, Conor McCabe and V’Cenza Cirefice will map the dynamics of land use and resource extraction in Ireland, North and South, and present strategies for collective action to imagine and create more just and regenerative land relations.
Dr Alexandra Day and Aislinn Shanahan Daly will analyse what gave rise to the Epstein scandal. The Epstein scandal shocked people because of the scale of the abuse and the powerful figures around it.
Dundalk Communities United said its lasting horror is because it revealed something deeper. - this wasn’t just one man acting alone, it was a whole network protected by wealth, influence, and silence.
Dundalk Communities United said that this kind of abuse doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It grows out of a system built on inequality and power, where some people are treated as untouchable and others as disposable.
It said that the same forces that dominate and extract wealth, and plunder our environment, across the global shape life at home too, where women’s bodies and labour are still commodified and controlled.
Dundalk Communities United said that it is why women’s liberation is tied to the fight against imperialism and capitalism. As long as those systems remain, so will the conditions that allow abuse like that of Epstein and his circle to continue. Real freedom means going beyond outrage or conspiracy. It means challenging the system that made it possible in the first place.
Dundalk Communities United urged that if any of the above topics sparks people’s interest, to please come along.
“If you’re disgruntled by the housing crisis, widening inequality and the sense things are getting ever so worse we would also encourage to come along and join discussions on how to resolve these issues. Dundalk Communities United is a grassroots group in town and Left Éire is run on a volunteer basis.”
Tickets can be purchased online at lefteire.ie