Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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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.
Donald Trump is pulling out of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP). He is also likely to abandon the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). You would be forgiven for thinking that organised labour in Ireland might be pleased about this. After all, we have engaged in several campaigns […]
On 8 February 2017 the inaugural meeting of SPAB Ireland (The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Ireland) took place. In the audience were the bulwarks of Irish architectural heritage; the Irish Georgian Society, the Irish Landmark Trust, An Taisce, the Dublin Civic Trust. But the demographic for SPAB were better than for […]