Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Via violence to contempt to abstentionism to normalisation perhaps to government. By Dan Haverty. It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of Sinn Féin’s electoral performance in the Irish general election. Once the political wing of the paramilitary Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), Sinn Féin took down a political establishment that had been in power […]
In 2016 (and 2011, actually) Village editorialised, “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 […]
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is viscerally and divisively right-wing, socially and economically; but hides it behind incoherent and inept policies and a now-suspect nice-guy media persona. By Michael Smith. A famous 2010 Après Match sketch has Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar openly admitting he’s plotting to knife his party leader Enda Kenny while gratuitously denying, in a mid-Atlantic nasal twang, that he’s going to set up an elite party which of course suggests he is in fact intending to do just that. […]
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Review: Derek Jarman at IMMA. By Noelle English. Derek Jarman was a bombshell in the 1980s. As an artist, filmmaker and gay activist, he made music videos for The Smiths, Marc Almond, The Pet Shop Boys and others. His film ‘Jubilee’’s representation of punk so outraged Vivienne Westwood, one of its progenitors, that she designed a t-shirt in […]
This production by Theatre Lovett, the Irish National Opera and the Abbey Theatre is fun and artistic, but the opera’s libretto is lost in the woods By Rory O’Sullivan Engelbert Humperdinck (not that one, I’m afraid) produced the opera Hansel and Gretel from four songs he wrote to accompany a puppet show his nieces put […]
Sinn Féin’s exciting economic and social agenda needs to be weighed against its ambivalence on violence, its cultism and its environmental weaknesses. By Michael Smith. Village believes equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability are the most important policies. So how does, now rampant, Sinn Féin fare under these criteria? Of course Sinn Féin has been attacked for […]
Ireland’s Trotskyist left and its structured campaigning, issue by issue, until the people overthrow capitalism By Oisín Vince Coulter. On 10 March 2016 Richard Boyd Barrett was defeated by 111 votes to 9 in the election of the Taoiseach during the first sitting of the 32nd Dáil. Ruth Coppinger had nominated him with the Connolly […]