Ireland's political and cultural magazine
By Tony Lowes ‘Governments treat the information in their possession as a resource, to be doled out in amounts as they see fit, either copious flows or mean little trickles. I noted that ultimately, it is the Government that controls the tap – Emily O’Reilly, Information Commissioner 2003-13’ In a serious blow to […]
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Pesticides from salmon farms are extremely ecotoxic to crustaceans, fish and humans – Tony Lowes
The recent ratification by Ireland of the UN’s Aarhus Convention still has a year’s probationary period before citizens can lodge complaints against our authorities. The NGO inspired Convention requires access to justice and information. Ireland has, however, already found itself at the receiving end of a preliminary ruling that threatens the country’s vast subsidies for […]
What happens when the Guards don’t support the Government and the media won’t report the Guards? One of the most frustrating and revealing aspect of the war over turf cutting – and there are many – was the media’s failure to report what actually happened on the night of Wednesday 20 June 2012 […]
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Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney seems bent on leaving a biodiversity wasteland – and once again forcing the emigration of the last small farmers that keep the hills alive.
An appeal from Friends of the Irish Turf Cutters not to take the fall for Government inaction and incompetence and go jail because successive elected officials and civil servants have undermined their way of life. Why should they punish themselves by going to jail when it is the Ministers of the time and the civil servants – many of them still there – who should be suffering for the lose of their traditional rights? False hope was what they have been given – and up the garden path they have been led.
This week Kerry County Council blamed the Kerry slug from holding up the Macroom By Pass through a Judicial Review. But in fact the Judicial Review is being taken many miles from the home of the slug to protect a national monument. The traffic hell that the residents of Macroom are enduring is being blamed on the wrong slimy creatures.