Politics
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Transparency switch still off
By Gavin Sheridan Two weeks ago the Supreme Court ruled in the case of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) vs Commissioner for Environmental Information. The court ruled that NAMA was a public authority for the purposes of the Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) Regulations 2007/2011. It found that while the High Court […]
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Largely ignored
By Niall Crowley The NGOs assiduously did their shadow report, two actually. They headed over to Geneva to comment, address and witness. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) produced a whopper of a report for the occasion and also headed for Geneva. The media chipped in with an article or two. The Government […]
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Continuing Direct Provision
By Sue Conlan Emily O’Reilly, European Ombudsman, recently described Direct Provision as the “human-rights elephant in the room”. The Working Group on the Protection Process [for asylum seekers], that recently submitted its final report, has looked at the elephant but, perhaps not emboldened enough given its terms of reference, it decided to look away again. […]
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By Eoin O’ Malley. Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt were very different men, with very different interests. One was a Protestant, a member of the Anglo-Irish elite, the landed gentry. He was an instinctively cautious man. The other was the son of Irish emigrants evicted from their land. He had radical ideas about land […]
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Picking at Piketty “What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is in fact the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt, neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the […]
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Anatomy of an eviction
“We’re being evicted”. By Roger Yates This was the text message that I had been dreading – and yet, one I expected sooner or later. It came from a ‘squat’ in north Dublin and the “we” was a female squatter and her rescued greyhound. I grabbed my keys and headed for the place… Rewind to […]
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By Eoin O’ Malley The extraordinary decision of Irish media not to publish brings the concept of parliamentary privilege to the fore again. It has been invoked on a number of occasions in the last few years, sometimes in ridiculous circumstances, sometimes for political grandstanding, but also to allow the Oireachtas to do its job […]