Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Ireland has a dreadful, inequitable, dangerously failing healthcare system. The State’s answer is the likes of healthy Ireland, which runs a public campaign that, in essence, throws the responsibility for health on to individuals – who seemingly just need help from an initiative to ‘empower and motivate them’. February saw the launching conference – hosted by […]
Real justice requires access to justice, which requires effective access to courts, which requires that courts be accessible without the threat of prohibitive costs. Some 90%, or an even higher percentage, of people in Ireland have no realistic access to justice, due to the prohibitiveness of the costs associated with legal actions via the courts. The […]
‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’ is the title of what will surely come to be seen as one of the more important social science works of our time (Pluto Press, 2017, €23). In it Australian economics professor William Mitchell and Italian political theorist Thomas Fazi reconceptualise the Nation […]
The Westminster terrorist attack on 22 March of last year, by lone attacker, Khalid Masood (52), who drove a car into pedestrians and fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer, is not the first time that terrorists have selected the Palace of Westminster, and its surrounds, to perpetrate an act of violence. 39 years ago, on 30 March […]
Village has learnt that John L.L. Imrie, formerly of MI5 and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), died last summer without a whisper of his passing reaching the ears of the press. Imrie had the unique distinction of being the only British official ever linked to the Kincora Boys’ Home sex abuse scandal by name in the […]
One of the things historians may dwell on is how the key December 2017 and February 2018 eu drafts of the Brexit agreement came to take the forms they did. It is all the more important since the inept UK Government of Theresa May failed to produce its own draft, though it might have been expected […]
The British media is aghast at revelations that a man called David Floyd was a Soviet spy. Floyd worked for the Foreign Office in the 1950s and was assigned to a string of Eastern European embassies. He confessed his treachery shortly after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald McClean to Moscow. Rather than admit […]