Politics

January was the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which sponsored the civil rights marches that brought the anti-Catholic discriminatory practices of the old Stormont Unionist regime to world attention. I was at that foundation meeting on Sunday 29 January 1967 in the International Hotel, since demolished, behind Belfast […]

We are now witness to a pervasive acceleration in the normally glacial processes of geopolitical rebalancing in the West. Behavioural economics is helpful in analysing it. On his first full day in the White House, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the core international economic legacy of […]

THE PROBLEM. Donald Trump is a purveyor of hatred, a contrarian: anti-liberal, anti-democratic and hostile to a free press, an anti-environmental, corruptible bully; a liar, a misogynist groper and a boor. He developed the political platform you would expect on the back of this persona. And as Village went to press at the beginning of […]

Around 25,000 undocumented people, 2000-5000 of them children, live in Ireland. Their precariousness is an inevitable consequence of a piecemeal immigration system.

Reform the 2009 Act: recognise intention, eliminate aggravated and punitive damages and juries, cap awards, compensate oppressed journalists and elevate free speech.

In 2007, as the spin-heavy, scandal-bruised Blair era came to a close, British journalist Peter Oborne published a harsh polemic titled ‘The Triumph of the Political Class’. The book describes the rapid growth of a professionalised cabal of career politicians in the UK from the late 1970s onwards – a self-interested clique more devoted to […]