Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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 […]
Homelessness was always a winter story and affected individuals only. Now it’s an all-year narrative and the homeless are no longer just isolated individuals -although they are still there – but families, in all their forms and colour. Our recent research for the Housing Agency report, ‘Family experiences of path- ways into homelessness – the families’perspective’, […]
NIance For a long time the two issues that appeared to enjoy cross-party support in Northern Ireland (apart from horror of bauble-free direct rule) were one-off housing and visceral anti-abortionism. Now Sinn Fein appears to take a more nuanced approach to abortion. As do the courts. The Belfast High Court has ruled that abortion legislation […]
Apolitical blast from the past has returned to haunt the much troubled Wicklow County Council and its former county manager, Eddie Sheehy. Former councillor and once prominent Green Party member, Deirdre de Búrca, recently learned that the Council has abandoned a Supreme Court appeal taken by Sheehy after she secured a High Court judgment in […]
Post-independence Irish politics provided few characters as compelling as Dr Noël Browne who was born just months before the events of Easter Week, a century ago, in December 1915.
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Enda Kenny was not in fact damned by the Fennelly report. It found he did not sack or seek to sack hapless Garda commissioner Martin Callinan. Admittedly there are caveats and a “however”, but from the fury of commentators and opposition politicians you would think Kenny was Bertie Ahern. When people need to be fired, […]