Current Magazine
World leaders turned toadies as Trump dismantles international law and pollutes the discourse, without concerted opposition.
Six months ago Zack Polanski was a lively London Assembly member known mainly for his theatre background and a tabloid humiliation involving “hypnoboobs”.
By February 2026, the idea that Donald Trump represents an endlessly renewable force of disruption moved from hard to stomach to hard to sustain.
As the government prepares to jettison the triple lock, clear thinking could make Ireland a power for peace
A new way of reading ‘Ulysses’ may be found, which will harmonise all its symbols and references to external reality
In an age of limitless distractions, adulthood is now just one lifestyle option among
Lessons for those who are too civilised for tormented times from Stefan Zweig, friend of Joyce, technology sceptic and the greatest storyteller of the last 100 years
Recreating an entire universe: Brendan O’Byrne reviews ‘Beyond the Pale’ by Patrick Healy
RTÉ needs security so it can do the stuff other broadcasters can’t but it should modernise including by focusing on its player, social platforms, podcasts, video, and archives; and leveraging trust
Kevin Kiely reviews ‘The Living Skeleton: Irish Famine Poems’, edited by Pamela Mary Brown with an Introduction by Dr Kevin Kiely
Press council of Ireland. Office of the press Ombudsman
Journalism needs trust not algorithm-based truthiness and pervasive hallucination
Behind the compassion, Ireland’s non-profit ts are machines to outsource responsibility for a State that relies on nonprofit t failure as much as nonprofit t success
Ireland now has rural fibre but the NBP remains a monument to bad planning, political avoidance and a settlement pattern that makes every infrastructure project cost more than it should
As a student, I’d hammered on the doors of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, insisting there was a major gap in its coverage.
The main problem with Irish media isn’t newspaper closures it’s lack of investigation, narrow-ranged reporting, big tech, and feebleness
Michael McDowell’s recent opinion piece in The Irish Times rehearses, with characteristic confidence, a series of amateur claims about Wood Quay that do not withstand scrutiny.
Ireland’s housing debate is strangely insular. We compare ourselves obsessively with the UK, Vienna and the Nordics, while ignoring the most provocative counterpoint on the planet: China.
Juries: redundant lawyers’ bauble or the last bastion — Starmer’s Labour doesn’t seem to know
Lucy Letby case suggests need for: legal aid for equal expert evidence for defence; code for experts; and facilitation of joint reports.
Increased sentence was appropriate for false imprisonment of former partner
Ireland’s rental regime forces tenants into a permanent state of precarity, the threat of homelessness functions as an unofficial instrument of policy.
Reviewing Roland Philipps’ unoriginal but hyped biography of Roger Casement and his podcasts.
A critical examination of John Collison’s imported ‘abundance’ narrative shaping Ireland’s housing debate.
The Irish Times’ Pat Leahy is the establishment’s favourite storyteller
Understanding the MI6-NATO carrot and stick PsyOp against Irish neutrality
UK Press Standards body (IPSO) abdicated duty to assess truth about Irish antisemitism.
February-March 2026 PBBy Aoife LungrenIreland has quietly transformed its migration and asylum regime over the past year in at least these ten ways.
OBITCHUARY: Michael McLoone who broke Donegal’s planning and ethics systems.
February-March 2026 15Frank Fitzpatrick joined GERRY ADAMS for a partisan rambleReflections on friendship with Martin McGuinness, their place in history, war, peace and Ian Paisley
Dympna Waldron still reels more than twenty years after she blew the whistle on opioids in Irish hospitals.
The controversy over the finances of the School Transport Scheme has taken a dramatic turn following a court action by Bus Éireann to prevent the further circulation of information recently published in Village.
Post-Troubles leaders in Northern Ireland are bad-tempered and a bit second-rate.
Domestic abuse by gardaí is in the news with the shocking case of former garda Margaret Loftus whose complaints against her husband, detective garda Derek Bolger, ultimately given a suspended 3-year sentence for a lesser charge of assault, were not treated seriously by the force.
There’s a bang of the Apocalypse about everything, under Trump and his gang, with raging climate change and incoming fascism though, compoundingly, they are widely denied. Anyway, hello 2026 from Villager.
Ireland’s submission in support of South Africa’s case against Israel over Gaza of wants genocide to be based on the foreseeable consequences of actions instead of the intent of those actions but the ICJ is reluctant to find enocide where actions can be scribed to other international cimes
mother, wife, architect, barrister,
social conservative, former articulate
spokesperson for the Catholic Iona
Institute and now failed Presidential
candidate.
When Paris police picked up a drunk Australian carrying
€195,000 in cash, they uncovered an alleged money-laundering
scheme led by a Dubai-based Irish horseracing heir linked to
British royals.
China’s impressive fastest-growing
cities, with compromised privacy
Ireland’s submission in support of South Africa’s case against Israel over Gaza of wants genocide to be based on the foreseeable consequences of actions instead of the intent of those actions but the ICJ is reluctant to find enocide where actions can be scribed to other international cimes
Multilateralism is the geopolitical equivalent of mediation between abused and abuser
What does like mean, online?
Though for long it was assumed that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom was not based on a Dubliner, he may have been based on ‘Altman the Saltman’, a Republican and prominent Jew, of Usher’s Quay
Paul Durcan’s soft comicverse is mostly indistinguishable from whimsy
The disgracefully slow intellectual
evolution of Piers Morgan and The Rest
is Politics on Israel’s War on Gaza
Regulators in the UK and Ireland are
favouring Child Protection over Privacy
Both smug and static, Ireland thinks of itself as upwardly mobile; Britain is traumatised by post-industrial decline
CETA’s investor-court system could let Canadian-backed investments sidestep Ireland’s new FDI-security screening — creating legal and economic risks.
The Red Orchestra‘s heroic and doomed opposition to Hitler could be a template for resistance but goes unrecognised in the West
ÉAMON RYAN REVIEWS ‘The Lie of the Land’ by John Gibbons, Sandycove (just published): “In the future people will look back and thank him for what he has done for Irish farmers, just like his father before him
Peatlands make up just 3% of the earth’s surface but store 25% of the world’s total carbon, more than all the forests – where 80% of the carbon is in soil, not trees
71 and 72 Narrow West Street are the line Louth County Council must hold
David McCullagh’s recent RTÉ documentary ignored
research that de Valera’s father came from Matanzas,
Cuba — not Spain as his mother told him
How our gatekeepers lost their keys — and how to hand them back
A new book examining the battles between Charles Haughey of Fianna Fáil and Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael overlooks the contrasting approaches they took in dealing with Britain’s covert intelligence services. While FitzGerald was happy to dance with Her Majesty’s diplomats and spooks, Haughey always recoiled.
COLM MCCARTHY REVIEWS Eoin O’Malley’s absorbing ‘Charlie v Garret: the rivalry that shaped modern Ireland’, Eriu/Bonnier Books (just published)
Increased scarring from post-surgical infection justifies
Governance and inauditability under scrutiny
Progressivism reverts to regressivism, but mainly inertia
There is friction in Cabinet between Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe who is generally reassuringly sceptical of new tax expenditures for developers and prefers targeted, time-limited or “activation” taxes; Fianna Fáil can’t help itself from championing subsidies/reliefs alongside state delivery.Meanwhile VAT on apartments is to be cut to 9% and the Help to Buy scheme extended. It’s all utterly unradical in the fact of a recognised crisis of quantity and an untold crisis of quality.
Government will tweak
income-tax bands again
in October, but don’t
expect pole-dancing and
it will quietly take a little
back is PRSI
warm but steely politician with a cultural hinterland and proud of her big family and Council-estate roots; a Republican who’s not backing down on Hamas, equality, the environment or anything else
Dublin City Council must not sell out the public domain of a vulnerable community off St Stephen’s Green to facilitate RCSI branding, but defer to elected representatives and finally assert the public interest
Immigrant-student employees at Conor McGregor’s pub speak out about dubious legality of their employment and being allowed to work more than 20 hours in term time
Procedural issues and differences
of emphasis among the relatives are
delaying the substantive hearings
Nobody cares about SIPO, least of all RTÉ and the Irish Times, as evidenced by coverage of its hearings, especially the recent one finding FF’s Meath Cathaoirleach, Tommy Reilly, attended meetings that yielded his son a €3.7m book profit.
Norma Foley, Leo Varadkar and other Ministers, quoting Bus Éireann and the Department of Education, have misled the Dáil on dozens of occasions about school-transport finances
Back then to the lonely editorial in Village’s last edition which generated some hostility
David Burke names MI6 agents within Garda and DoJ during TroublesFrank Connolly on misreporting of Project Eagle Commission report
T’S BEEN a long four months since our last publication. Some of that is because it’s not clear what the future is for a magazine like Village.
Project Eagle Commission hampered by ongoing criminal proceedings into Coulter and Cushnahan in Northern Ireland, as they, along with Brown Rudnick solicitors, Peter Robinson, and Sammy Wilson, refused to co-operate; and it refused to consider written submissions from John Miskelly.
Occupied Territories Bill promised in Programme for Government not even on legislative programme for current Dáil
Michael Healy-Rae’s deal with government is unlawful; and he should have resigned several company directorships when he became a junior minister
SIPO seems to be fl oundering to fi nd reasons to refuse even to consider complaints against former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar
Unsung hero, Laurence Rush, pushed effectively for truth of Omagh bombing
Northern Ireland’s Executive produces an unimpressive but not dysfunctional programme for government, finally
Jes Paluchowska interviewed Seán Thim O’Leary, new President of TCD Student Union: unconventional approaches to hold TCD accountable
Ireland adopts Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism and IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism
Hot Articles
World leaders turned toadies as Trump dismantles international law and pollutes the discourse, without concerted opposition.
Six months ago Zack Polanski was a lively London Assembly member known mainly for his theatre background and a tabloid humiliation involving “hypnoboobs”.
By February 2026, the idea that Donald Trump represents an endlessly renewable force of disruption moved from hard to stomach to hard to sustain.
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