Ireland's political and cultural magazine
In September, Elisabeth Moss twice used the word “fuck” as she accepted the best-actress Emmy for her role in the TV series ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. As it was a live broadcast, the network (CBS) was using a time delay and so was able to bleep out the offending words. There were many reports online and […]
The Government intends to hold seven referendums over the next two years, and the Citizens’ Convention is due to consider Ireland’s referendum practice before it winds up next spring. With a contentious abortion referendum looming up soon after that, this is a good time to consider how we run referendums. A code of good practice […]
In January 2017 the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI) reported on the treatment of children in care in Northern Ireland. The Inquiry, chaired by Sir Anthony Hart, conducted its extensive task with considerable speed and reported on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Inquiry shared something else with the then incumbent US president, […]
2016 was inevitably an outstanding year for the history industry as publishers, writers, and those elements of the intelligentsia that love a good commemoration got to work on the Easter Rebellion’s hundredth anniversary. The Irish people have an interesting relationship with their own history. It is, like their relationship to Catholicism, frequently the subject of […]
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Irish observers of the Rohingya refugee crisis will find disturbing similarities between Myanmar’s mistreatment of the Rohingya and formative aspects of Ireland’s own history. Today the Rohingya are victims of a brutal Myanmar military crackdown that has led more than 600,000 to flee the country on foot since August. The UN High Commissioner for Human […]
The fact that the West’s European civilisation is ending need not prevent us from thinking constructively about problems that have concerned us and that linger on. Nothing more useful is left for us to do. The Northern Ireland problem is an instance. It became a problem when Irish nationalism and the Irish State opposed a […]
The Green movement was born when we looked back on our planet for the first time and realised the threat we posed to our own natural world. It was a child of the 1960s, embracing and promoting civil, racial, feminist, gay, and animal rights. It was into making love not war and thinking globally, while […]
Ivan Preston and Danske Bank In the first case, the North’s Police Ombudsman found police misconduct in the treatment of a Bangor businessman, Ivan Preston, who had his 2014 conviction for harassment overturned on appeal. Preston had sent 357 emails in a year to a senior Danske Bank official, querying the awarding of a contract […]