Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Educate and empower Councillors to exercise effective governance and compliance over the €5bn administered by local authorities annually; and to be public not private representatives. By Fiona McLoughlin Healy. The Report on the Role and Remuneration of Local Authority Elected Members written by Senior Counsel Sara Moorhead issued to Minister John Paul Phelan last year and recommended an increase […]
As Covid takes everything from the Young, Society and the Media single them out for even rare breaches of the rules. By Zoë Jackson McGrath Youth is about the only thing worth having, and that is about the only thing youth has. Unfortunately a global pandemic has challenged even this iron law of cynicism and […]
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Ireland will again exercise its place on the Security Council to promote consensus rather than vision and values. By John-Vivian Cooke Ireland took a seat on the UN Security Council for the term 2021/22 on 1 January. This is the fulfilment of a key strategic goal of Irish foreign policy. However, having secured that seat […]
by Michael Smith It’s 2020. We’re transitioning to a civilisation with a wiser sensibility. We’re defenestrating monuments that subvert our values. What’s the first erection we should remove? On its twentieth anniversary, it’s Dublin’s spike, the ‘Spire of Dublin’, a tiger in metal. Dublin lost the run of itself in a boom that started in […]
Coronavirus shows that our self-destructive civilisation is fragile. But the earth may be on our side. by Vita Golden. This article argues that self-destructiveness including neo-liberalism facilitates twin scourges: plagues and environmental catastrophe (“ecocide”). In reacting, as you would expect, against ecocide Gaia, the force that regulates the earth’s environment, also attacks plagues and those […]
Government projections on how long a lockdown will last hijacked by pessimism not evidence, though readers will make their own minds up as to whether Ireland’s trajectory is more like those of China, Singapore or South Korea than those of Italy and Spain. By Michael Smith. It is obligatory to preface articles about Covid-19 with […]
Ireland’s largest party of the left may soon have us at last, whether we like them or not By Rory O’Sullivan Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Féin from 1983 to 2018, published five Audacity of Hope-style books – part-autobiography, part-political manifesto – during the most intense phase of the peace process in Northern Ireland. […]