Most young people start to become aware of their sexual identity from the age of 11 or 12 onwards. However for young lesbians, bisexuals and gays this can be the beginning of a lot of trouble. They will have to listen to almost constant homophobic (anti-gay) crap from their school mates and will often feel very isolated by the strong emphasis placed in youth culture on the importance of who-is-going-out-with-who.

INSIDE MODERN MEXICO the name of Ricardo Flores Magon is well known, and is regarded in a somewhat similar way to that of James Connolly in Ireland. But outside Mexico few have heard of him. Born to a poor family in 1873, he became a journalist on the opposition paper 'El Demócrata' after finishing school. In 1900, along with his brother Jesús, he founded "Regeneración', a radical paper opposed to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

A spectre (to paraphrase Karl Marx) was haunting the ruling class of most European countries in the aftermath of the French revolution in 1798. That spectre was democracy. The "problem with democracy" was that if it was conceded then the ordinary poor people, being much more numerous than their rulers, would surely swamp them.

Educate, agitate, organise. The phrase has been around for years but the ideas it encapsulates are still radical. We live in a world where we are encouraged to be passive. We are all consumers. We watch, we read, we observe, and some of us wait, hope and dream. These words go against the grain. You can't build a revolution by watching from a distance. There comes a point where many decide that they are tired of sitting on the sidelines.

Before Christmas, abortion, once again was in the Irish headlines. Once again it was a teenager who suffered because successive governments have continually avoided introducing legislation which would allow abortion in Ireland.

Liverpool dockers refuse to sell jobs
International solidarity actions continue

In December Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, announced a "fast-track" procedure for dealing with the backlog in applications for asylum in Ireland. This announcement came hot on the heels of a Supreme Court judgement which ruled that a Russian woman, Olga Anisimova, should be deported to Britain, because she had passed through that country on her way here.

BY 1993, as Shell's spin-doctors were teaching budding executives that "ignorance gets corporations into trouble, arrogance keeps them there", 300,000 Ogoni peacefully protested against Shell's operations (i.e. massive pollution and employment of paramilitary gangs as 'security'), only for 2,000 to be butchered, and countless others raped and tortured by the Nigerian military.

The articles from the three issues (53-55) of the Irish anarchist paper Workers Solidarity that were published in 1998.