Ireland's political and cultural magazine
It’s been a bad couple of years for democracy. The Brexit fiasco was the most humiliating British retreat from Europe since Dunkirk, but this time, entirely self-inflicted. Yet, rather than an alarm, Brexit instead turned out to be a blueprint for the bloodless US coup that followed, where right-wing extremism seized the world’s most powerful […]
In December a group called ‘Identity Ireland’ made much of a do online about the relative nothing of unfurling their banner from a bridge over a motorway. The banner urged motorists to “DEFEND IRELAND”, prompting one Twitter user to quip they were “11 days too late” (referring to the Irish soccer team’s humiliating 5-1 defeat […]
My brother told me about a stag weekend he went to recently. The bus that was taking them to Galway hosted an online game where they bet on virtual horses. On arrival, the fellas announced that they had organised a poker night for the husband-to-be. The next day they went to the races. ‘Wow’, you […]
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States, including our own, have always afforded privileges to certain groups above others through their laws. Various codes have upheld discrimination in gender, pedigree, ethnicity, and even ordained that one person is the property of another. But positive law co-exists with another ideal of a universal Rule of Law, or justice, conceived in classical antiquity […]
Trinity College’s recent Conor Cruise O’Brien centenary symposium was a largely uncritical exercise. It was especially notable that it was so as it focused on Irish politics. Invited US academics, who discussed O’Brien’s assessment of the American Revolution, appeared unaware of O’Brien’s distinctly illiberal local contribution. Reverential tones underpinned contemplation of O’Brien’s analysis of Irish […]
In the early 1980s the government decided to try to get children to drink more milk. I’m not sure that there had been a problem with children not drinking milk. As I recall, that’s all we drank. Yet it introduced a free milk scheme. The milk was to be distributed through schools and it was […]
I recently concluded a criminal case in the Crown Court in Manchester; a city I had not visited in over 20 years. Much has changed while I’ve been gone. It is a little less frenetic, with no Tony Wilson or Hacienda club, and a good deal more gentrified. Salford, the traditional working-class area, immortalised in […]