Politics

Kenny has conducted himself with as much dignity as any leader at home or abroad, and attracted international respect. He’s more or less done what it said on the tin, and he really didn’t offer to do anything else.

Inadequacy is set to remain one of the most significant features of the welfare state in Ireland. Fiscal conservatism, lack of capacity to get traction from ‘taxability’, and failure to generate adequate revenue suggest Ireland’s welfare state will remain not up to its task. This is the somewhat gloomy conclusion to the recently published book, […]

Josephine Campbell (not her real name) volunteered for the media team in Apollo House during the 28 day occupation, which saw a vacant NAMA building transformed into a shelter for people sleeping rough. In total, 205 people stayed as residents in Apollo House. “I’m currently without a home or a tenancy since May 2015. Before […]

Judges and the Garda let our society down: make the Garda Commissioner accountable to the Ombudsman, and establish a Judicial Commission.

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 […]