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    What values underlie Irish foreign policy?

    By Lorna Gold. Academics, policymakers and NGOs met in early April at the Royal Irish Academy to examine how Ireland’s new foreign policy, ‘Global Island’, can be put into practice. The striking thing about this policy is an extraordinary clash between the two key sections: that on ‘Our Values’ which establishes a framework of values […]

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    After Aras Attracta, de-institutionalise!

    By Niall Crowley. Political and media outrage is strangely hard to direct and seemingly impossible to sustain. There was a lot of it about, though, when ‘Prime Time’ did its exposé of Aras Attracta in Mayo and the inhumane treatment of people with intellectual disabilities there. The Taoiseach led the way with: ‘This was frightening, […]

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    Human rights and Irish tax policy.

    By Sorley McCaughey. Tax policy poses options to prioritise one sector of society over another. As with all choices, there are inevitably winners and losers. Professor Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has firmly linked tax policy with human rights. He has posed this challenge squarely in the Irish context. […]

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    NGO glass ceiling.

    By Deirdre Murray. International-development NGOs discriminate against women even though their remit is to promote women The “glass ceiling” is alive and well in the business sector in Ireland. A survey carried out by the Irish Times (2014) of the Top1000 Businesses in Ireland found that only 25% of the c-suite jobs (jobs with the […]

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    Milibandwagon.

    By Michael Smith. The UK’s May election looks to be as unpredictable as any since February1974, the first of two that year, which produced the first hung parliament since the second world war, giving Ted Heath’s Tories more votes, though fewer seats, than Harold Wilson’s Labour. They collapsed later in the year. Polls have long […]

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    Convie may finally get his SC’s investigation.

    By Michael Smith. Gerard Convie worked in Donegal County Council as a senior planner for nearly 24 years. He has claimed, in an affidavit opened in court, that during his tenure in the Council there was bullying of planners who sought to make decisions based exclusively on the planning merits of particular applications and that […]

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