Ireland's political and cultural magazine
The Religious Sisters of Charity have now transferred the assets held by them in St Vincent’s Healrhcare Group to a Catholic holding company which was set up by offshore specialists with links to the Panama Papers. The British Virgin Islands have just made the news with the arrest of their Premier in Miami […]
The campaign for the truth about the infamous McGurk’s bar bombing has uncovered the existence of a covert intrigue hatched by the British Army’s counter-insurgency (i.e., dirty tricks) guru, Brigadier Frank Kitson, and the RUC, to conceal the truth about the UVF’s bomb attack massacre at McGurk’s bar fifty years ago. Kitson and the RUC […]
• An Bord Pleanála’s manifest ethical weakness in perspective • The planning appeals board, An Bord Pleanála, has been brought into disrepute by its deputy chairperson’s property deals, by his criminal failed declarations of property interests and mishandled conflicts of interests, and by his receiverships. He must go. System of Planning Appeals […]
By Eddie Hobbs What is Putin’s big Disruption Strategy? To find out I’ve been engaging with geopolitical experts. I don’t dwell here upon the effectiveness of the mounting responses to Putin’s aggression. He faces a coalition of overlapping opponents: the EU, UK, NATO, USA – many countries and multinational corporations. The military strategy of […]
Lawbreaking, some misconceptions and the fundamentals of the original Garda complaint
Rory O’Sullivan watched Bridgerton Season 2 yet wonders why anyone would bother. A period-piece represents the past and by representing dominates it. In general, the past survives only mythologically, as a collection of loose figures and attitudes in the present. In a period-piece, the prevailing attitude imbues these figures with itself and alters the past […]
In Spring, when I was born, Ireland was full of daffodils: in the city in window-boxes and the front-gardens of houses, apartment-buildings, and on the stony small ridges beside footpaths as well as here and there in forests and uncultivated fields. I have always identified strongly with the daffodil. I have never said so […]
By David Burke. This article was first published on 2 July 2021. It is republished to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lord Widgery’s infamous report which defamed the victims of Bloody Sunday and exculpated those who murdered them. 1. Brigadier Frank Kitson subverts the law. Brigadier Frank Kitson of the British Army […]
Everywhere Salvatore of Lucan’s art combines a rigorous and searching honesty about all the most characteristic aspects of a single place, time and self with the intense feeling of a world which is not that place and time – even his name: as much serious as joking, as much old as completely new. […]
6 Ormond Quay Upper Dublin 7 D07H324 The Secretary An Bord Pleanála 64 Marlborough St Dublin 1 D01 V902 14 April 2022. By email only to bord@pleanala.ie, communications@pleanala.ie Re: the imperative of An Bord Pleanála pursuing a criminal complaint under Sections 147-149 and 156-157 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 (the “Act”) against […]
Dolphin Square VIP sex abuse. Dolphin Square was opened in London’s Pimlico in 1936. It soon became a magnet for all sorts of scandal and intrigue: espionage, political, sexual, not to mention mysterious deaths. ‘Scandal at Dolphin Square’ provides a riveting account of the lives of a rolling maul of fascinating and complex characters. As […]
a few hundred pages of hard books – or else a few minutes with the sculptures of Giacometti Theorists try to understand the world as if unfolding in a giant process with certain rules, whereas for artists the point is to observe it as a spectacle of which any thoughts and representations are just […]
In poetry the nearest figure to Patrick Kavanagh is Charles Baudelaire. Both were often destitute. Both found a verse that was above all music, not aspiring to music, like Walter Pater said of every art-form, but music itself made of words and because of it more profound. For both men the heart […]
The debate in Ireland about joining NATO, or some sort of an EU military arrangement, is now on the political agenda like never before. Pro-neutrality advocates argue that the country is sleep walking into a military alignment of one sort or another with Western military powers. They point to the fact that US air force […]
One of Greek tragedy’s foremost concerns is the contemplation of polarities. In a part of Sophocles’s Antigone, Ismene tells her sister, “You have a warm heart for cold things”, In ancient Greek culture, warm things are alive, cold ones dead; but for Antigone, now, the fire of her life and self has its source in […]
The Media’s treatment of the lies: an epic scandal ignored. It was March 1998. The RTE journalist Geraldine Harney informed me that I was to be dismissed by the ISME directors Peter Faulkner and Eoghan Hynes. She was doing the decent thing. Nevertheless, it was a preposterous suggestion and I told her so. However, in […]
In a whitewashed barn decked out with Ulster flags, Union Jacks and pictures of the Queen, their leader in charge of this meeting sat at an old table. He pressed a button on a tape recorder. A voice boomed out: I address you as the commander in chief of the organisation, Silent Defenders. Author Ciarán […]
After an inexplicable delay of five years, the public apology recommended in the final report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry will finally be made by the Northern Ireland Assembly (on 11 March). The announcement of the apology has been received with little enthusiasm by some of the abuse victims who say that they will […]
