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    The Rule of Law in Ireland, end 2017

    This article asks what is meant by the concept of The Rule of Law and, after the resignation of a second Minister for Justice in two years, whether such a concept is honoured in Ireland today? Dysfunctionality and hypocrisy have dug a chasm between the theoretical affirmation of the rule of law by lawyers in […]

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    Why Pay Teachers [They’re Only Women]?

    Last month, Minister for Education and Skills Richard Bruton mentioned that “the idea of courses to upskill homemakers were among a number of steps under consideration” to deal with the shortfall of teachers in key subject areas. Calling them “homemakers” may have been correctly gender-neutral, but the issues at stake are not. How could they […]

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    One Cheer For The Sugar Tax

    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 […]

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    Don’t Feed The Bots

    One in four Twitter followers of Philip Boucher Hayes is a fake account, the RTÉ broadcaster announced on his Twitter feed recently. Around the end of August, Boucher Hayes had noticed an uptick in new followers on Twitter, which he had monitored since. “Previously 100/150 people would follow me every week”, Boucher Hayes posted on […]

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    On Visiting Bosnia 25 Years Later

    2017 marks 25 years since the start of the Bosnian war which followed the breakup of the formerly Communist Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina passed a 1992 referendum for independence. Nearly half of its citizens were Bosnian Muslims. […]

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    Lowry and Sinclair

    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 […]

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