Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Gerard Convie is a man who wears sober ties and measures his words. He worked for the County Council in Donegal, once Ireland’s most beautiful and wildest county, as a senior planner for nearly 24 years. He has claimed that during his tenure in the Council planning irregularities were perpetrated by named officials at the highest […]
January The Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar, reveals he is gay to a receptive Miriam O’Callaghan, becoming the first openly-gay government minister in Ireland. The Irish economy is not some kind of exemplar, says President Michael D Higgins, controversially but magnificently. Mahon tribunal reverses its finding of corruption against Ray Burke because the tribunal never […]
Whistleblower says key witnesses and evidence omitted from Banking Inquiry and prepares for a public battle.
The Treasury boys are back. Without Treasury. Great. Richard Barrett is reported to be deploying two billion euro of investment in property and Johnny Ronan has paid Nama back and is back in business all over town. He’s even found time to make reference to Nazi slogans in pinpointing the injustice done to him by […]
Two recent events highlight the true nature of the ongoing Irish economic recovery. Firstly, ahead of the infamous Ireland-Argentina Rugby World Cup match, the press office of the main governing party, Fine Gael, produced a rather brash infographic. Charting projected growth rates in real GDP for 2015 across all Rugby World Cup countries, the graph put […]
There is no greater telltale sign of an election in the offing than when a government starts pledging to give your own money back to you. The Fine Gael-Labour Coalition has promised no less than €3bn between this year’s budget and 2016 in extra spending and tax cuts. Commentators often decry ‘auction’ politics. However, without an […]
Post-independence Irish politics provided few characters as compelling as Dr Noël Browne who was born just months before the Easter Rising, a century ago, in December 1915. Raised in a wicked combination of tragedy, poverty and illness, Browne saw his father, an inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, pass away from […]