Ireland's political and cultural magazine
In an article on 27 March in the Irish Examiner ‘Simon Coveney Looking at All Means of Getting more Houses’, the Minister for Housing made serious and precise statements about the housing market. Mel Reynolds checked them. CLAIM: “Many years of pro-cyclical policies contributed to the crash that caused a decade of inactivity, and it […]
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Kathleen James-Chakraborty reviews ‘One Hundred & One Hosannas for Architecture’ by Shane O’Toole, Gandon Edition. Designed much like a guidebook, to fit into the pocket of a good tweed jacket, and with not one but three ribbons to hold one’s place, ‘One Hundred & One Hosannas for Architecture’ is in fact a collection of essays […]
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The figures given for housing completions 2015-2017 are simply and definitively untruthful and misleading. It is extraordinary that the political Department of Housing and the normally scrupulous Central Statistics Office continue to tout them though the deficiencies have been highlighted by Mel Reynolds in Village and elsewhere.
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The former Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogan, made a promise he did not and could not deliver to spend €50m of public money on the remediation of an illegal waste dump. This was in order to avoid the emergence of damaging evidence in the High Court about the role of Wicklow County Council (WCC) […]
Simon Coveney’s avoidance of the facts on housing completions is a metaphor for our governance
Communication techniques in politics (marketing and advertising) are becoming increasingly targeted. Online political marketing is now increasingly tailored for individual voters based on their political preferences, ideals, and values, fears even. So far, so relatively mundane. That is until, inevitably, someone comes along and finds out a way to manipulate all the mass data available […]
The idea for a television licence decoupled from ownership of a television, proposed by Fine Gael as long ago as the 2011 election campaign as a “content tax” or “public broadcasting charge to apply to all households and applicable businesses, regardless of the device they use to access content” has undergone several iterations since, but […]
Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’ knows a good story when it sees one and came across a doozy in the Irish Times on 20 March. Kitty Holland had interviewed Mary Higgins, CEO of Caranua (meaning ‘good friend’), the state organisation set up to provide continuing support for victims of institutional abuse. Higgins said that some abused people […]
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In the 1970s, climate scientists knew there was a link between CO2 and global warming, the cooling effects of sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere and even of Earth’s cyclic change of orbit around the sun, believed to be the precursor to the planet’s ice ages. Between the 1940s and 1970s was a period of global cooling […]
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The Garda appears to be stumbling from crisis to crisis. As Village was going to print Fianna Fáil was considering a vote of no confidence in its management and the Government had agreed a ‘root and branch’ review. It is now difficult to keep account of all of the controversies that the force has been embroiled […]
In certain circles it is still a compliment to say someone is civilised. Or for that matter a lady or a gentleman. Mostly, however the expressions are now notable for class undertones as if to be a gentleman was to be Bertie Wooster, to be a lady a badge of subservience. The word has been […]
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In the great pantheon of aggrieved minorities in the US, no other has been open to such unrestrained media hostility and acts of violence against its people and property, as the nation’s Arab-American community. Muslims have been repeatedly singled-out by successive presidential administrations for attacks against civil liberties, covert surveillance by the sprawling intelligence apparatuses […]
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The suppurating carcass of the proposed Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on North Wall Quay in Dublin became a symbol for Ireland’s economic collapse. Its original architects Traynor O’Toole Ltd – in what is best seen as a fitting gesture – eventually went bust. In plain view of all on Dublin’s regimented riverside, the country ogled […]
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Paul Muldoon is killing poetry
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In 2015, I moved to New York City from Dublin and passed much of the year paying maniacal attention to American news media. I fixated on a wide range of output, people, processes, and interaction between journalists. One difference was more immediately apparent to me than others. The arc bending towards justice as facilitated by […]
I recall a vivid simile used by Professor Tom Bartlett when I was a student in UCD. He likened Irish history to a pint of Guinness, “with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth, including all the political movements, everything else”. Old habits die hard. An obsession with property endures. By the […]
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Jacques Derrida had a reputation for being one of the world’s most obscure philosophers, but if he had been alive during the rise of Trump, I think he would have had a lot to share. In his 1994 work ‘Spectres of Marx’, Derrida attacked the clichéd view that the collapse of the communist state meant […]
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There is a good reason to regard the labour historian C Desmond Greaves (1913-1988) as the intellectual progenitor of the 1960s Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, for it was he who pioneered the idea of a civil rights campaign as the way to undermine Ulster Unionist majoritarianism. Greaves is best known in Ireland for his […]
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Often we hear of how terrible climate change is, how it will cause the death of millions, mass extinctions, desertification and the end of life as we know it. But what are the roots of our common crisis, on our common home? Is it really all our fault, or, as environmental historian Stefania Barca asks, […]
Kenny has conducted himself with as much dignity as any leader at home or abroad, and attracted international respect. He’s more or less done what it said on the tin, and he really didn’t offer to do anything else.
