Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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 […]
Ivan Preston and Danske Bank In the first case, the North’s Police Ombudsman found police misconduct in the treatment of a Bangor businessman, Ivan Preston, who had his 2014 conviction for harassment overturned on appeal. Preston had sent 357 emails in a year to a senior Danske Bank official, querying the awarding of a contract […]
One of the intriguing characters in the story of ‘NAMA-land’, the title of the book I have written which has just been published by Gill Books, is the former general secretary of the Department of Finance, John Moran. The Limerick man was appointed to the second most senior position in the Irish civil service by […]