Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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When a State enacts legislation that creates a right for a category of person, it is acknowledging that society has excluded or marginalised those people and is seeking to rectify this. This is why people with disabilities welcomed the Assisted Decision- Making Act 2015 last year. It is why, despite some misgivings, they welcomed the […]
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What is it about Irish legislation? We set up this complicated institutional apparatus to enact it. We elect all sorts to devise and deliberate on it. Much of the time of civil society is diverted to lobbying for it. Legislation doesn’t come cheap or easy. However, while we are entitled to have some minimum expectations, […]
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For the current partnership Government and its political-allies-in-opposition the end of summer has brought with it some rather unpleasant affairs. And a string of seemingly never-ending, insider scandals rocking the Irish charitable and sports ‘sectors’, is just a small headache, compared to the migraines of Irish economic and tax-policy fiascos. The reason is simple: in […]
The NAMA story is the media gift that keeps on giving. Not a day passes but further damaging revelations emerge of the manner in which the agency charged with selling off the distressed and other assets arising from the State’s property collapse has behaved. Charged with disposing of commercial and residential properties on an enormous […]
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Irish politics insincerely enmires itself in the need for joined-up thinking, that ubiquitous cliché. But it skirts around the best place for it: amalgamating our erratic but once again soaring economic genius with other more real agendas – making sure we pursue ends and not just means, that we advance social, environmental, cultural and transparency […]
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Andrew ‘Andy’ Devane may not be familiar to you. However the buildings, mostly ergonomic and beautiful democratic public buildings in concrete, always imbued with his generosity and modern perfectionism, certainly will be. Early Years Andy Devane was born on 3 November 1917 in 1 Upper Hartstonge Street, in Georgian Limerick. He was the eldest of […]
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What an irony it would be, in these times of the exponentially reducing quality of public debate arising from media degeneracy, parliamentary groupthink, the tyrannical imperatives of political correctness, the moronic cacophony of the twitterati and the impoverishment of the education system, if the only functional dialectic available to our society was to occur between […]
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Simon Coveney was born in Minane Bridge, Cork in 1972. Scion of a family of Cork’s rarefied merchant bourgeoisie, Simon was one of six children of Pauline and Hugh Coveney. Both his parents were Mayors of Cork and his father, Hugh, Minister for Defence in 1994 before resigning the following year after he leaked details […]