Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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Who remembers the car-crusher in Goldfinger? The Ford Motor Company supplied a range of its cars to this smash hit of the James Bond franchise, which came out in 1964. Quite near the end of the movie, the henchman Oddjob, a kind of cross between Jeeves the butler, Kim Jong-un and Cian Healy, drives a […]
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The global climate movement is making a comeback. In the last two years alone it has managed to mobilise millions of people on to the streets. Over 500 institutions worldwide, with assets worth €3.5tr have committed to taking their money out of the fossil-fuel industry. The key shift has been to focus squarely on the […]
Note: This article has been updated since publication in May’s Village magazine. The Irish courts recently awarded €75,000 damages for a defamatory comment published on Facebook. Digital Rights Ireland described this judgment as a “wake-up call for a lot of people” that the law of the land also applies online. When did we reach this […]
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Welcome to my world in the North, for a minute or two. For half a decade, the worthy burghers of South Dublin and suchlike places have had to suffer the horror of Gerry Adams in the Dáil, doing unspeakable things in two official languages. Bad enough but now you have a variant of the whole […]
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In his lengthy critique of the planning tribunal and its first sole member, Justice Feargus Flood, in the April edition of Village, Anthony Harris manages to avoid any mention of why his former client and Dublin assistant city and county manager, the late George Redmond, was the subject of corruption findings by the inquiry. He […]
Introduction by Kieran Glennon In the immediate aftermath of the violence that erupted in Belfast in August 1969, Citizens’ Defence Committees (CDCs) were formed in many nationalist areas; barricades were hastily erected and patrols of vigilantes armed with clubs were organised to ensure that loyalist mobs, the B Specials and the RUC were all kept […]
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‘The Left-Handed Gun’ is not a film that many people will have heard of, let alone seen. It’s a 1958 Western, starring Paul Newman and directed by Arthur Penn. And it was on TG4 a couple of Friday nights back. TG4’s weekly ‘An Western’ has been a quiet staple of Irish television for some years […]
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Independent investigative journalist, Gemma O’Doherty, has slammed a culture of fear in Irish newsrooms and a stifling environment, as media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands. Speaking at the the Newsocracy conference organised by MEP Nessa Childers in partnership with the Institute For Future Media and Journalism (FUJO) at Dublin City University, O’Doherty addressed the […]
A complaint to the European Commission about the lack of independence of the Irish data protection commissioner could cost the State thousands of euros in daily fines if upheld. POD, the Primary Online Database, wasn’t supposed to be a problem for the government. A single database maintained by the Department of Education containing the full […]
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That there was something altogether more disturbing about Hitler’s Germany than Stalin’s Russia is often assumed. Perhaps it derived from disappointment at Germany, the most intellectually and industrially-advanced country of its time, being led by an individual whose core belief was the annihilation of a substantial ethno-religious minority. By comparison the aspirational ends of Stalinism […]
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We are told that the Brexit debate is the most important political decision our neighbour has made so far this Millennium. Even so, the debate in the UK could compete for the most boring referendum campaign ever. It’s been little more than a series of ‘he said, she said’. The claims made by each side […]
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On 26th May the European Parliament passed a comprehensive and progressive report on “Poverty – A Gender Perspective”. There has been recognition of the feminisations of poverty for decades, but there has been little progress on tackling the root causes for this. There is a whole range of factors at play and the report is […]
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In 1976, an ageing farmer living a few miles from Killarney wanted a medical card. He had just turned 60 and a few years previously had suffered a stroke. Medical cards were a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland back in those days and so he called up his local Fianna Fáil councillor to ascertain how […]
The spark of any human venture is imagination. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in his ‘In Defence of Poetry’ distinguishes this from reason, the “enumeration of qualities already known”; whereas “imagination is the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole… Reason is to imagination as the instrument […]
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Ireland is awakening to the environmental impact of its livestock industry. Village has been to the fore in focusing on this unpalatable subject while the newspapers ignored it. RTE has been more craven still in its favouritism towards a livestock industry, often lovingly referred to as ‘our farmers’. He who pays the piper calls the […]
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Poets are banished from Plato’s ‘Republic’ where the philosopher king is the sole guardian of Truth. Their lyrical distortion is identified as a revolutionary threat to the singular established idea. This was recognised by James Joyce who wrote: “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, […]
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As traffic falls, North’s High Court overturns unnecessary habitat-destroying road for inadequate assessment of its effects, for the moment
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Things took a dramatic turn for the Travellers down on Spring Lane in Cork last week. Cork City Council’s Director of Housing presented a report for debate by City Councillors. It proposed a swift reduction in the number of Travellers resident on the Spring Lane site. This was to be achieved by making offers of […]
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One of the side deals done in the attempts to form a government was to send the issue of the 8th amendment of the Constitution to a Constitutional Convention. The issue was raised by Labour, though just 2% of voters said it was the main determinant of their vote. Convening a convention is a good […]
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“The people have spoken, but what have they said?”, the head-scratching commentariat has endlessly mused since the March election, as it reluctantly negotiates a changed universe where politics once existed in a binary-star system with just one waxing or waning moon and the occasional incoming independent or ideological comet to exert some short-term gravitational influence […]
