Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Assets that are social not just financial Ireland’s housing crisis and swirling property prices threaten precious and irreplaceable green spaces in our cities and suburbs with housing developments. House prices have risen more in the first six months of this year than the entire twelve months of 2016. Recognising the opportunity for maximum prices to […]
Several years ago I lectured in a management school in England. One of the classes I gave was on food marketing. I began the class by playing a clip from the then famous documentary, ‘Super Size Me’, where the protagonist Morgan Spurlock undertakes an extreme diet of McDonald’s-only food for a month to chart the […]
A few rules completely cover the mysterious case of The Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2017. The judiciary should be independent but not self-selecting. Independence is good, preening is bad. Lawyers robustly defending the judiciary against encroachments by the executive is welcome though not if it has been fundamentally mendacious and itself cut across the independence […]
The Minister for Housing, and recent FG leadership contender, Simon Coveney, appointed a former senior Council official to investigate an allegation of financial malpractice at Cavan County Council (CCC), even though the former official had been accused in the High Court of being “up to his neck in corruption”. In March, Coveney and his department […]
The Garda is in trouble, morale is low and there are numerous investigations into alleged incompetence and cover-ups. Village has been to the fore in detailing these delinquencies. The purpose of this article is something different: to highlight through a not untypical case the extent of the duty and the dangers of service. Overall, 88 […]
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After a couple of stuttering seasons, Season 6 of ‘Homeland’, which ended in April, pulled off a decently gripping story this time round. The writers make life difficult for themselves, as with its predecessor ‘24’, by making daring near-future predictions about the political reality that will be in place by the time the show airs. […]
I don’t like ‘-isms’,” War of Independence veteran George Gilmore once said to me. “Heaven save me from the Marxists!”, an exasperated Karl Marx is reputed to have exclaimed. “All the ‘-isms’ are ‘-wasms’ ”, was a witticism following the collapse of East European communism in 1991. Nonetheless ‘-isms’, ideologies of one kind or another, […]
Dante Alighieri opens ‘The Divine Comedy’ with the immortal lines: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita. (In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight path was lost) To the medieval mind […]