Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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I didn’t expect to find the China Daily in a beach town on the Algarve but then maybe that’s a logical place to find it, given the large population of expats and holidaying bureaucrats there. The same newspaper (its European edition) is also available for free in the very busy transfer lounges of Dubai and […]
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“Everybody has lived this war”, writes Marwa Al-Sabouni at the beginning of her remarkable book, ‘The Battle for Home – the memoir of a Syrian architect’, which details in a singular voice how this once tolerant and beautiful country in the Middle East rapidly descended into murderous chaos after the Arab Uprisings in 2011. Al-Sabouni […]
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“My foreign policy is ‘Don’t do stupid shit’”, Barack Obama said to the White House press corps on board Air Force One in 2014. So the New York Times’ Mark Landler, who was there, tells us in a recent illuminating book on the contrasting foreign policy approaches of Obama and Hillary Clinton as the US […]
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How’s this for a deeply unpromising script idea: making a movie about a failed politician trailing around the world presenting wonkish slide shows on his laptop to mostly small audiences about, of all things, climate change? It hardly helped that the ex-politician in question, former US vice-president Al Gore was reviled across the political spectrum. […]
The first ever World Humanitarian Summit, held in Istanbul last month, is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with our world and our politics today. It brought the global political theatre, which has replaced real action at the UN in recent years, to new lows. These lows are all the more reprehensible when the lives […]
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On Tuesday 17th May exploratory drilling for oil began in Woodburn Forest, near Carrickfergus, County Antrim, the first adventure of fracking on this island. There are serious concerns about a lack of transparency and democracy as the project comes to life, despite an official moratorium on fracking. Campaigners point to a litany of governance and […]
The arrest of two men in connection with the criminal investigation into the sale of Project Eagle, the single largest disposal of Irish state assets, has discharged a seismic shock through the establishment, north and south. So shocking indeed that the government and large sections of the media have been caught napping, unable to explain […]
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It is arguable that Aristotle – next to Homer – was James Joyce’s greatest master. Without the ‘Odyssey’, Joyce could never have conceived ‘Ulysses’; had he not written the book celebrating his first rendezvous with a beautiful girl from Galway, whatever he wrote would, however, have been profoundly marked by Aristotle. There is, I suggest, […]