Politics

Most of our often impressive disability legislation has simply not been commenced

Alternative needed to this pervasive zombie doctrine

The European Commission has made impressive efforts to secure the wellbeing of Roma and Travellers across the Member States. In 2011, it developed the ‘EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020’ to tackle the marginalisation and poor socio-economic conditions of the Roma (including Irish Travellers). Each Member State was required to draw […]

When a State enacts legislation that creates a right for a category of person, it is acknowledging that society has excluded or marginalised those people and is seeking to rectify this. This is why people with disabilities welcomed the Assisted Decision- Making Act 2015 last year. It is why, despite some misgivings, they welcomed the […]

What is it about Irish legislation? We set up this complicated institutional apparatus to enact it. We elect all sorts to devise and deliberate on it. Much of the time of civil society is diverted to lobbying for it. Legislation doesn’t come cheap or easy. However, while we are entitled to have some minimum expectations, […]

What an irony it would be, in these times of the exponentially reducing quality of public debate arising from media degeneracy, parliamentary groupthink, the tyrannical imperatives of political correctness, the moronic cacophony of the twitterati and the impoverishment of the education system, if the only functional dialectic available to our society was to occur between […]

Simon Coveney was born in Minane Bridge, Cork in 1972. Scion of a family of Cork’s rarefied merchant bourgeoisie, Simon was one of six children of Pauline and Hugh Coveney. Both his parents were Mayors of Cork and his father, Hugh, Minister for Defence in 1994 before resigning the following year after he leaked details […]