Ireland's political and cultural magazine
By Edmund Honohan MEDIA ANALYSIS of the EU Commission’s 2016 Apple judgment that Ireland gave the company €13bn in illegal tax aid is half-baked, and the Irish government’s defence even worse. The implications of the judgment are much further-reaching than many realise. The Commission has argued that Apple’s two subsidiary companies in Ireland – […]
The revelation that the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) has failed to disclose “relevant material” to the Commission of Investigation into its controversial sale of its 11.5 billion (£1.24 million) Project Eagle loan portfolio in the North in 2014 will not come as any surprise. Many NAMA watchers have been wondering how the Commission, headed by […]
Last month, Minister for Education and Skills Richard Bruton mentioned that “the idea of courses to upskill homemakers were among a number of steps under consideration” to deal with the shortfall of teachers in key subject areas. Calling them “homemakers” may have been correctly gender-neutral, but the issues at stake are not. How could they […]
Heritage and the Irish Psyche The cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing drives the perception of properties in Ireland. There is a belief within the Irish psyche that new is best, even when it comes to our historic properties. We flock to perambulate around our country houses and their […]
In the early 1980s the government decided to try to get children to drink more milk. I’m not sure that there had been a problem with children not drinking milk. As I recall, that’s all we drank. Yet it introduced a free milk scheme. The milk was to be distributed through schools and it was […]
I recently concluded a criminal case in the Crown Court in Manchester; a city I had not visited in over 20 years. Much has changed while I’ve been gone. It is a little less frenetic, with no Tony Wilson or Hacienda club, and a good deal more gentrified. Salford, the traditional working-class area, immortalised in […]
The Green movement was born when we looked back on our planet for the first time and realised the threat we posed to our own natural world. It was a child of the 1960s, embracing and promoting civil, racial, feminist, gay, and animal rights. It was into making love not war and thinking globally, while […]