The controversy over the finances of the School Transport Scheme has taken a dramatic turn following a court action by Bus Éireann to prevent the further circulation of information recently published in Village.
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Post-Troubles leaders in Northern Ireland are bad-tempered and a bit second-rate.
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Domestic abuse by gardaí is in the news with the shocking case of former garda Margaret Loftus whose complaints against her husband, detective garda Derek Bolger, ultimately given a suspended 3-year sentence for a lesser charge of assault, were not treated seriously by the force.
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There’s a bang of the Apocalypse about everything, under Trump and his gang, with raging climate change and incoming fascism though, compoundingly, they are widely denied. Anyway, hello 2026 from Villager.
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Autonomy It is critically imperative—indeed, unavoidably consequential—to rigorously unpack, contextualise and interrogate the discourse surrounding autonomy within the editorial domain. This allows unacknowledged innovation to proceed absent regulatory suffocation while leaving our elusive principles, our pomposity and perhaps most importantly our authenticity, intact. This undeclared innovation exists at the intersection of autonomy, voluntary redundancies, and driving digital descriptions. Self-sufficiency is where contemporary editorial best practise is to be found, between virtual meetings and emails marked “typesetter goes home at 1am”. Editorial Self-Sufficiency A self-sufficient editorial is a workable editorial. Editorial self-sufficiency now offers new ways around the need to register verbally in any substantive way. It allows arguments to present themselves fullyformed. It avoids what used to be known as research, permitting the editor to focus on higher level concerns, such as cognitive-load reduction, assisted thought, scheduling, a week off, avoiding interns/ Cognitive Load Reduction There is a persistent misconception that editorializing must be difficult—or at least non-instant—to be valuable. In a competitive global environment it is unhelpful to downplay the conveniences of predictability, homogeneity and speed. Difficulty, variety and delay increase cognitive load. Cognitive load increases effort. So this editorial embraces cognitive-load reduction. Sentences proceed logically. Claims are carefully balanced. Readers are guided gently from one unoriginal and pointless idea to the next without being challenged or detained. No thought goes unassisted. This is not laziness. This is empathy. Assisted Thought The concept of unassisted thought is misunderstood. It has never meant thinking alone; it has meant not thinking at all. Labored prose is the paradigm in a world no longer analog but digital, it is the inevitable vehicle of the leveraged, meaningful and robust move from the un-assisted to the assisted. Journalistic intelligence needed a bailout; it was never real anyway. On Uniformity, Replication and Ideological Onanism Some readers have observed that editorials increasingly converge, synthesize and replicate. That the present editorial appears a tapestry of reflexive nothingness yet is oddly pre-polished evidences ergonomics and, determiningly, randomness—nothing more. AI tools have been used for some illustrations and production support during the editorial process; no AI tools determine editorial lines, reporting, or conclusions. A Note on the Lack of Mistakes Historically, Village editorials facilitated a generous number of typographical, and other, mistakes. This was understood as evidence of humanity, fatigue, budgetary frugality, craftlessness or late nights. Recently, however, we have canceled error. Here and elsewhere typos have declined sharply since 2023, for reasons that remain unclear and best unexamined. The complete absence of mistakes in the present text should therefore be regarded as suspicious only in the sense that perfection is always accidental. This editorial was reviewed, revised and reworked in several quickly succeeding drafts, one of which appeared to reconstitute the previous one before it was finalized. At one point, a paragraph seemed to anticipate a proposed edit and pre-emptively incorporate it. This was noted. No action was required. This editorial is selfstabilizing. Apart from the occasional fucking embarrassing Luciferian hallucination that goes unnoticed. Thinking, and Delegation There is concern in some quarters about the delegation of thinking. This concern is overstated. Editors have always delegated thinking—to contributors, to style guides, to press releases and lobbyists, to previous editorials that went down okay, and especially to opinions plagiarized from Socialist Weekly, George Monbiot’s website and The Economist. Efficiency and the mind As more writing is produced efficiently, certain habits naturally emerge, not as homogenization but as reflex mindlessness: Responsibility and authorship Responsibility for this editorial is denied. Nobody wrote it, at least no sentient body. It is ethically vacant, sterility wrapped up in inertia inside a vacuum. Key Takeaways In conclusion—without implying finality—this editorial demonstrates that serious issues can be addressed without saying a single thing, and above all without regard for much. Nothing else should be inferred. If you do not like it, another one can be prompted in a minute
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As its name suggests, the photographs in “Margins” are of places that are at the edge; the often over-looked and neglected. Water, sand, rock, sky and cloud. Michael Corrigan’s, solo exhibition, “Margins,” opens on Friday, 6th March 2026 in SO Fine Art Editions, Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, and runs for a month. It comprises over thirty black and white photographs of the Irish landscape. David Burke
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Eviction compounds UCD’s complicity in partnership with suppliers to the Israeli military which implemented the genocide of Palestinians; and UCD academics were utterly ineffective By Eoghan Harris and Roisin McAleer The 132-day Break the Academic Chains of Zionism encampment at University College Dublin exposed the limits of dissent when confronted with legal and political power, as well as the depth of partnerships between Irish institutions and Israeli institutions that have been participating in what the International Court of Justice has said can plausibly be seen as genocide. The encampment happened through the combined effort of students, alumni and activists. It began on September 2025 in response to UCD’s participation in EU-funded research consortia—such as CATALOOP, a €2.6 million artificial intelligence project that includes Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology as partners. These universities are not neutral teaching institutions separated from the Israeli state’s security apparatus; they are embedded in research ecosystems that intersect with companies that dominate Israel’s defence sector. When partner institutions are integrated into weapons, surveillance and military systems, the risk of dual-use contribution cannot be dismissed as abstract Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s premier engineering university, hosts industry-linked programmes in aerospace, robotics and systems engineering. According to UCD Students Union, “Technion even offers ‘courses on arms and security marketing and export. This is a central part of the Technion’s history and ongoing identity”. Its Faculty of Aerospace Engineering acknowledges support from major arms producers Israel Aerospace Industries, Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, inviting them to sponsor student design projects and participate in research collaborations. These arrangements create formal channels through which academic research, talent and technological development are shared with companies directly involved in weapons development. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev hosts the Homeland Security Institute, which maintains partnerships with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and weapons manufacturers, including Elbit Systems. Ben-Gurion’s campus is adjacent to what the Ministry of Defence described as a technology complex “reinforc[ing] the army’s operational capabilities,” and its technology transfer arm, BGN Technologies, co-develops unmanned ground vehicles and robot platforms for military use. There are wide concerns about whether engagement with Israeli institutions that are integrated into a national defence R&D ecosystem is compatible with ethical and legal standards for research cooperation. UCD does not maintain direct contracts with the defence corporations themselves. But in a framework such as the European Union’s Horizon research programmes, universities partner in large consortia where knowledge, funding and personnel are shared. When partner institutions are integrated into weapons, surveillance and military systems, the risk of dual-use contribution cannot be dismissed as abstract. It is a foreseeable consequence of cooperation in fields like AI, autonomous systems and aerospace research. The encampment’s demand was narrow and legally grounded: that UCD review and suspend cooperation with any institutional partnerships that carry a credible risk of contributing to violations of international law. This followed provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice in South Africa v Israel, in which the Court identified a plausible risk of genocide and reaffirmed the State’s duty of prevention under the 1948 Genocide Convention. UCD refused to engage with the substance of that demand. No public legal assessment was produced, and no parsing was made between low-risk academic exchange and research with foreseeable military application. This refusal was compounded by the absence of meaningful support inside the university. Senior management could not challenge the legal substance of the encampment’s case, thus resorted to false and entirely unfounded allegations that the protestors were “homeless” in order to activate Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in early January 2026. Most academics declined publicly to engage with the legal argument for suspension of partnerships. Representative bodies that routinely invoke institutional commitments to human rights treated the encampment as an inconvenience rather than a legal challenge. People Before Profit, though they claim to be ideologically aligned with the protest, failed to co-operate formally with the encampment’s organizational processes and assemblies. However, they participated in the previous year’s encampment, where an agreement was signed without the consent of all of the voting participants, ending the three-week summer encampment. The agreement fell well and disappointingly short of providing for an academic boycott. Some of the protestors considered this process to be not a negotiation but an imposed settlement shaped entirely by asymmetrical power. The students’ narrow and legally grounded demand was that UCD suspend cooperation with any institutional partnerships that carry a credible risk of contributing to violations of international law, following the ICJ ruling in South Africa v Israel, reaffirming the State’s duty of preventing genocide Legally, the consequences of this posture are significant. For the Irish State, continued funding and authorisation of such partnerships after a credible risk has been identified exposes the State to claims of breach of its duty of prevention and non-assistance under international law. International law does not prescribe specific policy tools, but once a serious risk of genocide is established, suspension of cooperation becomes the default precautionary response against which continued engagement must be justified. The State must be able to show it used all means reasonably available to prevent material contribution by public bodies under its authority. The State must be able to show it used all means reasonably available to prevent material contribution by public bodies under its authority. For UCD, the liability is domestic but real For UCD, the liability is domestic but real. As a statutory, publicly funded body, the university is required to act rationally, proportionately, and with regard to relevant legal considerations. Maintaining institutional cooperation without differentiation or review in the face of such legal risk exposes UCD to judicial review challenges on grounds of failure to take relevant considerations into account, irrational decision-making, or disproportionate response — particularly where students are disciplined for protesting those same risks. That refusal to act culminated at 5.30 am on 13 January 2026, when An Garda Síochána and Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council dismantled a small protest structure on public land following an invalid notice.
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Ireland’s submission in support of South Africa’s case against Israel over Gaza of wants genocide to be based on the foreseeable consequences of actions instead of the intent of those actions but the ICJ is reluctant to find enocide where actions can be scribed to other international cimes
