Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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By John Gormley. Labour’s W****loo: political luck comes and goes on the grandest scale. Eventually a tabloid sub-editor will come up with a headline to sum up the imminent demise of the parliamentary Labour Party. It will involve some bad puns on water, loos and the party’s final Napoleonic election battle.. Older Labour heads are […]
By Michael Smith. Michael McLoone, former County Manager in Donegal is suing me. He wants damages, punitive damages, aggravated damages and an order prohibiting the further publication of unspecified statements the subject of the proceedings. We’re not worried. The proceedings relate to material the substance of which is privileged because it refers to affidavits […]
Planning Bill, more houses, social houses, measures against homelessness – but little about quality; and rezoning speculation to be shortsightedly reinvigorated. By Michael Smith Alan Kelly, Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government has announced major reforms of the planning system as part of the forthcoming Planning Bill which was approved by Government in […]
By Villager The Irish Times made seven mistakes in its court report of Mark Dearey’s defamation action against Village last year, including that Village had actually defamed him (which it had not) and that he was seeking damages, when he wasn’t. Under pressure they corrected two of them. Village then took a case to the […]
Bus–iness as usual In 1967 the Department of Education initiated free transport for post-primary schoolchildren. It was a progressive initiative thought up by the Minister, Donogh O’Malley, requiring that €1.2 million be paid to CIE for the first year to perform “matters of a purely transport nature”. CIE exacted a profit of 4% on […]
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By Kevin Buckley. Thomas Piketty and his colleagues at the World Top Incomes Database (WTID) have revolutionised the study of income equality through their clever harvesting of data from historical tax receipts and national budget records. Their data can be used to study how the proportion of national income collected by the very wealthiest people […]
The multi-million-Eurp scandal surrounding the illegal dumping of waste in county Wicklow is another legacy left to the new environment minister, Alan Kelly, by his predecessor, Phil Hogan and another reason why the latter’s proposed elevation to the post of European Commissioner has been questioned. In October last, Nessa Childers, MEP wrote a letter […]