Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Posted in:
Sometimes farmers find difficulty sleeping at nights. Random, gnawing thoughts drift into our heads as we doze off. Are badgers prowling around the farmyard? Are they sniffing the cattle? Is TB being transmitted? New research will allow us to sleep more easily. A project led by district conservation of cer Enda Mullen, with Trinity College […]
Way back in 2004, I wrote an article for The Sunday Business Post, entitled ‘Play Boys, but few Play Women’ highlighting chronic gender imbalance in Irish Theatre, on the occasion of ‘Abbey One Hundred’, a virtually all-male programme celebrating the centenary the Abbey Theatre, (apart from one children’s play by Paula Meehan, and a shared […]
Less than 30% of the writers in Village are women. And only 30% of the articles submitted for publication come from women. What’s going on? Village is politically correct and right-on. Uniquely it never, to take an example, markets magazines by putting attractive women on the cover. Village takes progressive social theory seriously. It consistently takes the […]
MoJoCon – the Mobile Journalism Conference which debuted in Dublin last year – has its roots almost a decade ago, when Glen Mulcahy, then working with RTE Nuacht, began experimenting with the camera on his Nokia N93 smartphone. “Video quality was atrociously bad, photographs were tiny, 1Mb was seen as huge, it was very much in […]
From the point of view of the media, one of February’s biggest stories almost got lost in the election chaos. On Friday, February 19th, one week before polling day, the newspaper circulation figures for the second half of last year were published. In one sense, the story was a bit of a non-story: newspapers continue to […]
The story of an election is much more than a few headlines, but the Irish Times front pages mercifully, if languidly, devoid of the kind of blatantly partisan positioning seen elsewhere, provide in hindsight a neat narrative of the campaign, with the slow realisation that Fine Gael was in trouble, the lack of a clear alternative […]
The Fianna Gael area rep was practisin’ his language, goin’ forward. He was glad you had asked the question but would you please let him finish. He didn’t interrupt you. Can you hear him at the back? He would have no hand, act or part in this coalition. That was a redline issue. Nothing was agreed […]
It is critical that the next Government have a credible and robust National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. This will depend on political will. The last number of months have been particularly difficult for Travellers and Traveller organisations. In October 2015 we witnessed the horrific deaths of 10 Travellers in a fire at a below-standard […]
General election 2016 rose up with a bang and ran out with a sizzle. Days before the voting started and well before the results were known, two simple facts of life took hold over anyone’s rosy expectations for the future as heralded by the political campaigns – Left, Centre and Right – of the imaginary political […]
The election is over, but the prospect of forming a government is still somewhat distant. This probably shouldn’t surprise us. Apart from the outgoing Fine Gael-Labour government none of the other parties were really proposing to go into government. Their campaigns were based on a critique of the incumbent government. The Irish people roundly rejected the […]
The most extraordinary coalition formed in Ireland was the first one, in 1948. It involved Fine Gael and a then-new party headed by Sean McBride, Clann na Poblachta. The Clann was a lively mixture of liberals, left-wingers and Republicans with a deep immersion in the IRA. The surprise with the Clann was that its youthful enthusiasm […]
Posted in:
In the 2012 documentary ‘Dreamtime Revisited’ poet-philosopher John Moriarity climbed Derada Hill in his adopted home of Connemara. Observing its hinterland he remarked that all about him was crooked, from the contours of the Oranmore River to the crooked coast towards the Aran Islands and the crooked horizon of the Twelve Bens. He calls this […]
The Oxfam Davos Report published on January 18 got relatively little media coverage here and was buried after twenty-four hours. Yet its content is truly shocking, pointing to a world that is witnessing massive inequality and an ever-widening chasm in the wealth of the big majority of humanity as against that of a tiny elite. […]
POINTERS FOR ECONOMIC EQUALITY 1. Jobs and long-term Unemployment The recovery in jobs is an important contribution to addressing recent, recession induced, levels of economic inequality. However, it is not the only contribution required of the labour market. The key labour market, and perhaps key public policy, issue for the next decade will be long-term […]
Posted in:
Result: D A poor vision that failed. Everyone who is ordinarily resident in the country has access to public hospital services, whether they have health insurance, a medical card or nothing at all. The services may not be free and may be subject to waiting times depending on medical condition. Without a medical card patients […]
Enda Kenny has defied those detractors who have claimed for many years that he is not up to the job of leading the country. Or has he? His supporters claim that he has brought the country, and the economy, from the brink of complete meltdown to steady recovery and is now set to be the […]
As we face into a General Election it is appropriate that we consider how we could construct a fiscal policy that can deliver fiscal and financial stability and sustainable economic growth. A fiscal policy that can provide the investment required for the delivery of decent services and infrastructure and that can adapt to changing demographic […]
Village is now eleven years old and has been published by Ormond Quay Publications since 2008. From its foundation in 2004, Village has been one of the few local publications that systematically criticised the thrust of the direction of the economy and society. The twenty-year reigning economic orthodoxies have finally been thrown out even if policy-makers […]
Posted in:
One value of the 1916 Rising commemorations is to highlight the contrast between the aspirations of those who set out to establish an independent Irish State for the whole island of Ireland and the reality of what exists today – a partitioned country whose native language, Irish, is on the point of death as a cradle-spoken […]
Posted in:
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht was beavering away looking for ways to ensure that no creature was stirring. Especially not a mouse. On 23rd December last year, in the political dead of night, the Minister charged with protecting natural heritage announced a plan to make destroying it […]
