Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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We are told that the Brexit debate is the most important political decision our neighbour has made so far this Millennium. Even so, the debate in the UK could compete for the most boring referendum campaign ever. It’s been little more than a series of ‘he said, she said’. The claims made by each side […]
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On 26th May the European Parliament passed a comprehensive and progressive report on “Poverty – A Gender Perspective”. There has been recognition of the feminisations of poverty for decades, but there has been little progress on tackling the root causes for this. There is a whole range of factors at play and the report is […]
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In 1976, an ageing farmer living a few miles from Killarney wanted a medical card. He had just turned 60 and a few years previously had suffered a stroke. Medical cards were a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland back in those days and so he called up his local Fianna Fáil councillor to ascertain how […]
The spark of any human venture is imagination. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in his ‘In Defence of Poetry’ distinguishes this from reason, the “enumeration of qualities already known”; whereas “imagination is the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole… Reason is to imagination as the instrument […]
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Ireland is awakening to the environmental impact of its livestock industry. Village has been to the fore in focusing on this unpalatable subject while the newspapers ignored it. RTE has been more craven still in its favouritism towards a livestock industry, often lovingly referred to as ‘our farmers’. He who pays the piper calls the […]
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Poets are banished from Plato’s ‘Republic’ where the philosopher king is the sole guardian of Truth. Their lyrical distortion is identified as a revolutionary threat to the singular established idea. This was recognised by James Joyce who wrote: “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, […]
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As traffic falls, North’s High Court overturns unnecessary habitat-destroying road for inadequate assessment of its effects, for the moment
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Things took a dramatic turn for the Travellers down on Spring Lane in Cork last week. Cork City Council’s Director of Housing presented a report for debate by City Councillors. It proposed a swift reduction in the number of Travellers resident on the Spring Lane site. This was to be achieved by making offers of […]