Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
One morning recently I woke up to abusive tweets. “What is it with lesbians hating unborn babies?? Please explain!”. “Why so many lesbians pushing abortion when they should never really need one??!!!”. As a long-time feminist campaigner and Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, vulgar interactions from anti-choice supporters are inescapable. I’m […]
By Ronan Burtenshaw In late September 2009 I was walking through Dublin as the city prepared for the rerun of the Lisbon Treaty referendum. Outside Dublin Castle I ran into canvassers from Generation Yes, a young, liberal, pro-Europe group established early that year to campaign for the passage of the treaty. Drawing them into conversation […]
For the Irish Left the latest round of polls should make sobering reading.
By Frank Connolly. The megaphone diplomacy involving prominent voices on the Left has brought some clarity to the task of preparing a common platform around which progressive parties, independent TDs, trade unions and other organisations and groups could unite in the months before a general election. At the Labour conference in Killarney there was a […]