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    Hands off civil society

    The UN’s Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, has called civil society “the oxygen of democracy” but its space is shrinking. This may be jargon, but it is inspired by a serious threat to democracy – the undermining of basic rights: freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the right to peaceful assembly. Civicus grandly describes itself […]

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    World Crass

    What was Richard Bruton thinking of when he referred to setting up a “world class” service, to establishing a new entity that is “all about making Ireland the best small country to do business in”, when he launched a “new era for employment rights and industrial relations”? The answer, surprisingly, is the Workplace Relations Commission […]

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    Fianna Gael

    The former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds once said that an Irish General Election was a series of 41 constituency by-elections. The vagaries of our proportional representation system mean that a modern Irish election can throw up all kinds of results. The landscape of Irish politics has been thrown into even greater uncertainty by the extraordinary destruction […]

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    Agenda for the Left: address 99:1 inequality.

    By Joe Higgins. The Oxfam Davos Report published on January 18 got relatively little media coverage here and was buried after twenty-four hours. Yet its content is truly shocking, pointing to a world that is witnessing massive inequality and an ever-widening chasm in the wealth of the big majority of humanity as against that of […]

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    Are you content, or angry?

    Will the 2016 election bury the idea that the left-right divide is the key one in politics? For most of the 20th century choices facing voters in Europe were to go for parties that said they’d tax more and spend the fruits on public services (the left) or those who would provide fewer public services and […]

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