Ireland's political and cultural magazine
The people who brought us Brexit didn’t know what the effect of the breach would be. No one did; or does. Leading British Leave campaigners, including Boris Johnson, appeared to consider that Britain could retain access to its single market but implement some limits on free movement. In fact, if Britain is to be in […]
If there’s been one new idea introduced into the discourse by the 2016 commemorations, we haven’t registered it. The Rising was an irrational response to a colonialist foe. The proper approach would have been to analytically survey the strengths and weaknesses of the occupying power, and to have respectively avoided and exploited them with the […]
The general election was tedious and it’s not really clear what message it purveys. The electorate seemed jaded and the politicians delivered no memorable new policies, apart from Renua’s utterly regressive at tax proposal. Village believes that elections should be all about ideas, ideology, policy (and how best to implement them). In these terms the […]
Village is now eleven years old and has been published by Ormond Quay Publications since 2008. From its foundation in 2004, Village has been one of the few local publications that systematically criticised the thrust of the direction of the economy and society. The twenty-year reigning economic orthodoxies have finally been thrown out even if policy-makers […]
In 2011 we wrote in this space, “You would think from our recent history of some of the most notoriously bad governance on the planet, that we would have learnt that our political classes need to be replaced. In fact, this election time we see no new ideas”. Sadly democracy in Ireland needs an overhaul every bit […]
Editorial, Village, April 2014 Gerard Convie is a whistleblower, but you won’t have heard of him. Over the last few years Village has helped a number of other whistleblowers whose cases are to varying degrees unassailable but have not been championed by the media or pursued by the authorities: Jonathan Sugarman on Unicredit Bank, Noel […]
Few countries elevate rejection as far as celebrating a national “No” day. But every October 28th Greece’s Oxi Day holiday commemorates the No with which it replied to a humiliating Italian ultimatum in 1940, a refusal to acquiesce that led to invasion. Greece is also the country whose stereotype is plate-smashing. The New York Times […]