Politics
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It is critical that the next Government have a credible and robust National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. This will depend on political will. The last number of months have been particularly difficult for Travellers and Traveller organisations. In October 2015 we witnessed the horrific deaths of 10 Travellers in a fire at a below-standard […]
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General election 2016 rose up with a bang and ran out with a sizzle. Days before the voting started and well before the results were known, two simple facts of life took hold over anyone’s rosy expectations for the future as heralded by the political campaigns – Left, Centre and Right – of the imaginary political […]
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The election is over, but the prospect of forming a government is still somewhat distant. This probably shouldn’t surprise us. Apart from the outgoing Fine Gael-Labour government none of the other parties were really proposing to go into government. Their campaigns were based on a critique of the incumbent government. The Irish people roundly rejected the […]
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The most extraordinary coalition formed in Ireland was the first one, in 1948. It involved Fine Gael and a then-new party headed by Sean McBride, Clann na Poblachta. The Clann was a lively mixture of liberals, left-wingers and Republicans with a deep immersion in the IRA. The surprise with the Clann was that its youthful enthusiasm […]
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History explains our Parochialism
In the 2012 documentary ‘Dreamtime Revisited’ poet-philosopher John Moriarity climbed Derada Hill in his adopted home of Connemara. Observing its hinterland he remarked that all about him was crooked, from the contours of the Oranmore River to the crooked coast towards the Aran Islands and the crooked horizon of the Twelve Bens. He calls this […]
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By Frank Armstrong. In the 2012 documentary ‘Dreamtime Revisited’ poet-philosopher John Moriarty climbed Derada Hill in his adopted home of Connemara. Observing its hinterland he remarked that all about him was crooked, from the contours of the Oranmore River to the crooked coast towards the Aran Islands and the crooked horizon of the Twelve Bens. […]
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The Oxfam Davos Report published on January 18 got relatively little media coverage here and was buried after twenty-four hours. Yet its content is truly shocking, pointing to a world that is witnessing massive inequality and an ever-widening chasm in the wealth of the big majority of humanity as against that of a tiny elite. […]