Politics
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One had a Nanny and went to Eton.
By Michael Smith. The differences between David Cameron and Nick Clegg (2010). No-one has ever contemplated the relative poshnesses of Ireland’s Enda Kenny and Brian Cowen. Both are classless (and only incidentally unclassy). Britain is different. In a society where people wear their class on their shirts or forearms (sleeved or tattooed), they are obsessed […]
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By Richard Callanan. Some hundred people gathered in October in a Portlaoise Hotel for a private meeting to plan joint action against what they perceive to be the government’s “flawed energy policy”. Reports from those in attendance variously concluded that these hundred people represented forty or possibly eighty-five different groups from across sixteen or seventeen […]
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By Niall Crowley Private-sectorisation’ is again the order of the day for many organisations in the community and voluntary sector. It is not a new phenomenon. Philanthropy offered an easy route into the community and voluntary sector for the private sector. Wealthy business people turned philanthropists never offered value-free funding. It came with management speak […]
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European standards for tenants
By Paul Newsome Dr Padraic Kenna’s pleas in the last two editions of Village for rent-control legislation and ethics in housing policy were just too gentle on Ireland’s systemic prostration in the face of unquestioned landlordism. Workers’ house prices inflated by four thousand five hundred per cent between 1990 and 2007 in Drumcondra Dublin. A […]
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By Frank Connolly. (November 2014) It should come as little surprise that a former Progressive Democrat minister is among those named in the dossier on tax evasion compiled by Gerry Ryan, the civil servant who has been investigating the Ansbacher files since 1998 and whose inquiry was closed down by then Tanaiste, Mary Harney, in […]
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Preferendum preferable.
By Peter Emerson. Preferendum: The received wisdom “The electorate might be bewildered”, declared Gerard Hogan, the lawyer (now judge), in the 1996 Whitaker Constitutional Review; “The referendum system”, he continued, “has worked well in practice”. This was written after the bitter divorce referendum of 1995, the vicious 1991/2 plebiscites in the Balkans, and the fractious […]
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Blue-sash elitism.
By Lynn Boylan, MEP. I am just over four months into my new role as a Member of the European Parliament and beginning to settle in, though I’m shocked by some of the sense of entitlement around here. Sinn Féin is a member of the GUE/NGL Group which is a confederate group committed to a […]