Ireland's political and cultural magazine
ON FEBRUARY 12, a criminal trial of twelve Catalan independence leaders, ten of them elected representatives, commenced before the Spanish Supreme Court. Though it is dressed up as a judicial process clearly it has political motivations and implications. It is clear there are systemic problems with the Spanish legal system. Village interviewed Olivier Peter, a […]
IRISH AGRICULTURAL policy over the past decade has generated unsustainable levels of dairy and beef production. The national herd is approaching 8 million in number and each cow produces 2 tonnes of harmful emissions per year. Industrial-scale farming has resulted in serious climate and national food-security issues which now must be addressed by incentivising the […]
WE NEED to think big and green about energy in our efforts to contain carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Renewable energy should be generated where there is capacity (e.g. Ireland – wind, wave, tidal; Spain – thermal, Iceland – geothermal). The challenge faced by Europe and Ireland especially is how to increase the share […]
ON 10 January 2016, Carles Puigdemont, a journalist and the mayor since 2011 of the city of Girona, northeast of Barcelona, was sworn in as the President of Catalonia. In assuming office he made abundantly clear that his foremost priority would be arranging a poll on self-determination, characterising his approach a few months later as […]
I HAVE KNOWN Ciaran Collins for several years. Days before we first met at a political meeting in Dublin, Ciaran had attended the funeral of Michael Lutton in Lurgan, Co Armagh. Lutton was a member of the Continuity IRA (CIRA) who died on 1 November 2010 and received a military funeral. I had never heard […]
IN MID-MARCH, following civil actions, the suspects for the 1998 Omagh bombing, which perpetrated the worst loss of life of the whole Northern Ireland troubles were bankrupted, one of them on his deatbbed. Focus was on the murderers not the victims or the security forces. However, there are still questions about prior knowledge the security […]
THE TRUTH is that the world is laughing at the UK’s discomfiture over Brexit. The world will be mildly discommoded by whatever happens but it be will be amply compensated by the comedy of the UK’s stupidity made possible by ignorance of history and economics. For a long time much of the world really didn’t […]
ON FEBRUARY 26th Mick Wallace and I attended a rally addressed by Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. It closed an International People’s Assembly which had taken place in Caracas that week, with over 450 community and trade union delegates from all over the world. Fresh from the Government’s defeat of Opposition attempts to break through the […]
THE SCATHING criticism by a human rights working group of the United Nations of the Government’s failure to meet its obligation to deliver affordable, public housing will not surprise those experiencing the unrelenting rise in homelessness and the cost of rental accommodation. What is new in the letter written by Surya Deva, chief rapporteur of […]
GEORGE MCLOUGHLIN made a Protected Disclosure in 2015 – when he was employed as a labour inspector with the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation (DJEI) – concerning what he perceived to be a culture of deference to non-compliant employers in the management of the National Employment Rights Authority (NERA) (subsequently the inspection services of […]
LEFT-WING MEANS favouring equality over unfettered freedom, redistribution of resources over property rights. If you’re on the left you’ll appreciate planning, taxation, minority rights and nationalisation. If you don’t maybe you’re anti-Establishment or anti-intellectual, or post-Left-and-Right or Fianna Fáil or just confused. Maybe a Trump figure or the gilets jaunes or the New Land League […]
RECAP OF PART ONE In Part One of this story, Alan Kerr described how he was sexually abused by three men at Williamson House, a Belfast Corporation Welfare Department care home in Belfast, in the 1970s. He was only six years of age when he was first raped. One of his abusers was Eric Witchell, […]
Posted in:
THE RIGHT to Private Property and private ownership of goods tends to divide the Right from the Left. In Locke and Hobbes, it is the central human right as it has always been from a Whig-Liberal or indeed a Neo-Liberal perspective. From a Marxist perspective it is an unqualified evil and even those who accept […]
Posted in:
Throughout its 20-year history, the Euro has been depicted as a crucial element of the development of the European Union. It was supposed to strengthen the European economy, bring EU Member States closer together and increase EU citizens’ prosperity. Yet, after the economic crisis in 2008/09 experienced by the southern Member States and Ireland, the […]
Posted in:
In 2018 award-winning journalist Gemma O’Doherty wrote several articles for Village magazine. She was easy to work with and produced good copy. Like many contributors she generously did not charge the magazine for her work. She brought a large social-media followership with her, writing pieces on human-interest stories – on Madeleine McCann; on Sophie Toscan […]
Posted in:
Dump neoliberalism and build the just society optimising liberalism and equality envisaged by Rawls, Dworkin and Declan Costello by David Langwallner In April 2015 I was asked to present a paper on ‘Towards A Just Society 2017’ to the West Cork Bar Association which, to my considerable surprise, was very well received by an […]
Both NAMA (The National Asset Management Agency) and Local Authorities have been criticised for ‘land-hoarding’, ‘sitting’ on sites particularly in Dublin and the Greater Dublin Area (GDA) and not developing land that could be used to address the current housing crisis. Despite the amount of land under their control, Minister Eoghan Murphy has recently asked the […]
Posted in:
We’re enslaved by social media which will manipulate emotions for money By Mark Kernan This year Facebook filed two very interesting patents in the US. One was for emotion recognition technology; which recognises human emotions through facial expressions and can assess what mood we are in at any given time -happy or anxious for example. This […]
Posted in:
The law can help: starting with a referendum by David Langwallner There are human rights to food, water, healthcare, a minimum standard of living, and housing. Despite western opposition they found their way into the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). They have wrongly been denied as rights in Ireland since […]