Ireland's political and cultural magazine
VILLAGE IS about nothing if it isn’t giving space to whistleblowers. Reflecting this, the magazine has several times illustrated articles with a cartoon whistleblower, cheeks inflated to bursting, typically to no political avail. It’s a good image for the magazine in general, Village’s frustrated sympathy is nearly always with those prepared to blow and it […]
The Green Party should be – and appear to be – this century’s equivalent to the trade union movement. By Councillor Oliver Moran. Protests against environmental taxes in Europe, farmers’ blockades in the Netherlands, urban unrest in France, and the water-charges movement here in Ireland should cast a long shadow for the Green Party in […]
“Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State” by Uĝur Ümit Üngör (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Reviewed by Chris Stanley. The genesis for this book was an analysis of Assad of Syria’s unleashing of militias to repress an uprising against his regime in 2011. Upon reflection the author realised that that violent episode deserved […]
by Michael Smith It’s 2020. We’re transitioning to a civilisation with a wiser sensibility. We’re defenestrating monuments that subvert our values. What’s the first erection we should remove? On its twentieth anniversary, it’s Dublin’s spike, the ‘Spire of Dublin’, a tiger in metal. Dublin lost the run of itself in a boom that started in […]
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An Outsider’s view of always present, now boiling, racism in Ireland By David Langwallner Hugo Hamilton wrote a book called ‘The Speckled People’ (1979)which to some extent mirrored my experience in growing up with a Germanic mother and a Gaeilgeoir Irish father who refused to allow him to speak English. “Speckled, ‘half and half…Irish on top […]
By David Burke. Introduction. The Arms Trial opened fifty years ago later this month, 22 September. It has since become clear that the prosecution was one of the most tainted episodes in modern Irish legal history and that, more than anyone else, the former Taoiseach Jack Lynch was responsible for the sham. The prosecution which […]
by Mannix Flynn The root cause of the homelessness crisis in Ireland is the broken housing system. Ireland does not have a public housing system to meet the needs of the society. The biggest mistake was the decision by Labour’s Joan Burton to cut social housing spending by 72% between 2008 and 2012 (€1.38bn to […]
By Joseph de Burca. Introduction. The documentary on the liar and fraud Carl Beech raises the most serious questions about the competence of the BBC which broadcasted it on 24 August. For years Beech masqueraded as the survivor of a VIP sex-abuse ring that allegedly engaged in the rape, torture and murder of children. During […]