Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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Transgender issues are becoming more visible. Last year’s Gender Recognition Legislation was mostly progressive and things are improving. However, it’s not all plain sailing for this community and their families. Families of transgender people face many challenges as their loved one undergoes a gender transition, and often have to shelve their own emotional needs as […]
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“My foreign policy is ‘Don’t do stupid shit’”, Barack Obama said to the White House press corps on board Air Force One in 2014. So the New York Times’ Mark Landler, who was there, tells us in a recent illuminating book on the contrasting foreign policy approaches of Obama and Hillary Clinton as the US […]
A defamation case currently under way in the High Court has exposed some of the tensions that have been apparent for many years between members of Wicklow County Council and its former county manager, Eddie Sheehy. Sheehy, who retired last year, spent several days in the witness box defending himself from a claim that he […]
Introduction by Kieran Glennon In the immediate aftermath of the violence that erupted in Belfast in August 1969, Citizens’ Defence Committees (CDCs) were formed in many nationalist areas; barricades were hastily erected and patrols of vigilantes armed with clubs were organised to ensure that loyalist mobs, the B Specials and the RUC were all kept […]
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Things took a dramatic turn for the Travellers down on Spring Lane in Cork last week. Cork City Council’s Director of Housing presented a report for debate by City Councillors. It proposed a swift reduction in the number of Travellers resident on the Spring Lane site. This was to be achieved by making offers of […]
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“The people have spoken, but what have they said?”, the head-scratching commentariat has endlessly mused since the March election, as it reluctantly negotiates a changed universe where politics once existed in a binary-star system with just one waxing or waning moon and the occasional incoming independent or ideological comet to exert some short-term gravitational influence […]
For years vital Irish public services were consistently starved of funding at a time when taxes were being cut for electoral reasons. This is unfortunate but it has consequences which cannot be denied, whatever the ideology of the (non-)payer. Keeping water prices at an artificially low level leads to a vicious cycle of underfunded service-providers, […]