Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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By Orla O’ Connor. The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) has campaigned for a gender budgeting approach to be implemented by Government. This would mean that all budgetary measures were assessed for their impact on men and women. We would have got a very different budget had this been done. A recent ESRI and […]
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By Sinéad Pentony. Budget 2015 was inequitable, with the balance of taxation measures disproportionately benefiting middle and high earners. Rather than cutting taxes for higher earners it would have been fairer to begin reversing some of the cuts from previous budgets. Reversing cuts in social welfare and public services, especially in the areas of disability […]
By Sinéad Pentony. The EU Social Justice Index developed by the Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation does not make for smiley reading in Ireland. Ireland is ranked 18th out of 28 countries, well below the EU average. The top three countries for social justice are Sweden, Finland and Denmark. (Chart 2 shows the overall rankings). The Index […]
By Constantin Gurdgiev (November 2014). Of the 196 appointments to state boards made by the current Coalition, only 35 resulted from open public competition. Pay increments for civil servants – for length of service not performance – remain in place. Only .75% of civil servants received less than three out of five in the […]
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The danger of the ‘Shoebox’ myth. By Ronan Lyons It is accepted by almost everybody that, in a city with Dublin’s geography, a home with a south or west aspect is preferable to one that faces north or east. Similarly, who could argue that having 60-square-metres to live in is better than 50? Everything else […]
The Interloper: Ireland’s national accounts extraordinarily manipulated. By Constantin Gurdgiev. Since the publication of the second quarter 2014 (Q2 2014) National Accounts on September 18th, Irish media have virtually abandoned any critical assessment of the economy in a fog of fawning, culminating in some wayward demi-jubilation over the Budget. The ‘crisis easing’ narrative of […]
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By Constantin Gurdgiev. Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’ (Harvard University Press, 2014) has ignited both public and professional debates about the economics of income and wealth distribution not seen since the inter-war period a century ago, when applied Marxism collided with laissez-faire economics. To give the credit due to the author and his […]