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    Fake O'Brien-Desmond Letter

    Dear Dermot, I woke up in Haiti on the morning of April 29th,to a phone message saying that RTÉ had sent me a letter with questions regarding my confidential banking arrangements with Anglo Irish Bank/ IBRC. My immediate reaction was astonishment – astonishment – that RTÉ could be used in such a way, so deliberately, […]

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    Substance over form there, please

    In Ireland philosophy rarely features in mainstream discourses. We seem more comfortable in either the narrow empiricism inherited from our former colonial overlords or the lyrical engagement found in poetry. The unflinching analysis of concepts found in philosophical enquiry is not part of secondary educations: it still does not figure as a Leaving Certificate subject. […]

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    Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Bill 2015: First Stage

    Deputy Catherine Murphy: I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Act 1993 in order to make an addition to the First Schedule, to expand the areas under which an examination under section 9 may be conducted, and to provide for related […]

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    Portuguese parallels

    In 2011 Portugal was at the forefront of Europe’s anti-austerity movement. Yet, four years later, as elections approach in the Autumn, there is no chance of a Left government to ally with Greece’s Syriza or the recent municipal victories in Spain. What went wrong? And can Portugal return to the frontlines? Village’s Ronan Burtenshaw interviews Bloco de Esquerda’s […]

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    World War 1 and the Middle-East

    If Colonel Gadaffi were still running Libya there would not be mass migration across the Mediterranean, with thousands drowned because of unscrupulous traffickers. Gadaffi was guilty of the sin of all those secular dictators. He was too independent of ‘the West’. Britain and France, backed by America, bombed him out of existence. Their excuse was […]

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    The limits of Aestheticism

    Robert O’Byrne is an aesthete – possibly Ireland’s only one, a writer specialising in the fine and decorative arts. He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them ‘Luggala Days: the Story of a Guinness House’; a biography of Sir Hugh Lane; ‘A History of the Irish Georgian Society’; a ‘Dictionary of Living […]

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    Confessions of a Broadsheet addict

    Oh Broadsheet.ie! Where did you come from and why do I flit to you so reflexively? Why are the newspapers, which you for some reason call “De Newspapers”, suddenly so full of you? You are George Orwell for our Irish age. No concern needed, these post-modern days, to secure the “hearing” that motivated him: with […]

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