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By John Gibbons and Paul Price. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Novelist Upton Sinclair’s famous observation could well have been describing Agriculture Minister, Simon Coveney, a rare ambitious and ascending star on an otherwise jaded Fine Gael front bench. Coveney’s understanding […]

By Edel McGinley. Enda Kenny wrote to President Obama in November to commend him on the “humanity and leadership” he had shown in his efforts to regularise undocumented migrants in the United States. The Taoiseach’s words demonstrate great empathy for the many undocumented Irish in the US and an understanding of the need for decisive, […]

By Ivana Bacik. A poignant vigil was held outside Leinster House to mark the start of Women’s Aid’s ‘16 days of action against domestic violence’. The empty shoes of the 78 women murdered in Ireland by their partners or ex-partners since 1996, and the ten children murdered alongside their mothers, were lined up along Kildare […]

By Kevin Kiely. Here is another cliché for upwardly mobile Irish writers: struggling, but not to the point of discomfort, in your career as civil servant, journalist or whatever, you get a foothold through publication in a second-rate Irish journal or newspaper, make a few literary friends, and eventually get a publisher for your book […]

By Tom Hanahoe, Terence Conway and John Monaghan. On September 17 2011, hundreds of Americans gathered in New York’s Wall Street district, the very hub of American and global capitalism.  Calling themselves the Occupy Wall Street movement, they set up a protest encampment, which soon spawned similarly themed protests in over 100 US cities around […]

By Niall Crowley. Inequality is in vogue – from a recent editorial in Village calling for equality of outcome, to Thomas Piketty – extensively covered in this magazine – to academics such as Piketty and Wilkinson and Pickett, and – surprisingly – to conservative institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the Standards & […]