Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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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 […]
The Government intends to hold seven referendums over the next two years, and the Citizens’ Convention is due to consider Ireland’s referendum practice before it winds up next spring. With a contentious abortion referendum looming up soon after that, this is a good time to consider how we run referendums. A code of good practice […]
The fact that the West’s European civilisation is ending need not prevent us from thinking constructively about problems that have concerned us and that linger on. Nothing more useful is left for us to do. The Northern Ireland problem is an instance. It became a problem when Irish nationalism and the Irish State opposed a […]
The Green movement was born when we looked back on our planet for the first time and realised the threat we posed to our own natural world. It was a child of the 1960s, embracing and promoting civil, racial, feminist, gay, and animal rights. It was into making love not war and thinking globally, while […]