Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Irish news-radio programming shows a strong anti-tabloid bias in selecting contributors, according to an examination of survey data from the three main broadcasters earlier this year. Journalists interviewed by the stations’ news programmes and participating on panels came overwhelmingly from the Irish Times and Irish Independent during the survey periods, with none at all from […]
One way of dealing with Middle East and North African asylum-seekers coming to the EU would be to allocate them in proportion to the arms exports by the different EU countries to those areas. That would mean that Britain, France and Germany, in that order, would take most refugees. Would it not be fair that […]
The mammoth COP21 circus will folds its tent after Paris, on December 11th. Already, it’s been a record-breaker, with thousands of journalists and the largest ever gathering of heads of states descending on Paris for the two week jamboree. Conspicuously absent from the event were the tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of activists and demonstrators […]
Portentousness is the word that best delineates most Anglo-American literary criticism. The canon seems to demand erudition and a souciant hauteur loaded with the jadedness of the cocktail party. That at least is the tone favoured by the Times Literary Supplement whose reviewers tend to devour books as AA Gill does restaurants. Attending functions when […]
The slaughter of 129 innocents in Paris by the so-called Islamic State (IS) instils, by its casualness, fear into most of Europe. It is a new venture and one which is likely to be repeated perhaps until it affects all of our daily lives adversely. But IS operates on many fronts. Another comprehensivist IS policy […]
A few years ago, as print media watched their subscription and circulation plummet, digital advocates were fond of reciting the adage of internet guru, Clay Shirky, that “no medium can survive the indifference of 25-year-olds”. The advocates had a simple solution. Readers didn’t care about paper and ink, they wanted content, so move the content […]
Enda Kenny’s real vision is to make Ireland the “best little country in the world in which to do business”. Business doesn’t deserve him. Worse, business doesn’t deserve the rest of us. Business in Ireland is utterly corruptible. Big business in particular, Perhaps small businesses do their best but even there farmers are over-subsidized and […]
It has been a long and hard struggle for a Financial Transaction Tax in Europe. Now it looks like a breakthrough is possible. This has yet to make an impression on the Irish media and there has been no critique of the Irish Government’s refusal to participate. The European Commission had proposed an EU-wide Financial […]