News

By Gerard Cunningham and Michael Smith. The agendas and non-agendas associated with Ireland’s most powerful media owner, Denis O’Brien, are so complex that Village decided to try to bring some loose science to bear from a survey of newspaper coverage and front pages. The latest round of the Siteserv story broke on 19 April when […]

By Gerard Cunningham. Newspapers have grown used to the idea that they face an existential threat from the digital world, even if they haven’t quite figured out what to do about it.  But for a long time broadcasters, in particular radio,  thought they could be different. The truth is that, behind the chipper periodic press […]

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 […]

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, […]

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. […]