Several years ago I lectured in a management school in England. One of the classes I gave was on food marketing. I began the class by playing a clip from the then famous documentary, ‘Super Size Me’, where the protagonist Morgan Spurlock undertakes an extreme diet of McDonald’s-only food for a month to chart the […]
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A few rules completely cover the mysterious case of The Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2017. The judiciary should be independent but not self-selecting. Independence is good, preening is bad. Lawyers robustly defending the judiciary against encroachments by the executive is welcome though not if it has been fundamentally mendacious and itself cut across the independence […]
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The Minister for Housing, and recent FG leadership contender, Simon Coveney, appointed a former senior Council official to investigate an allegation of financial malpractice at Cavan County Council (CCC), even though the former official had been accused in the High Court of being “up to his neck in corruption”. In March, Coveney and his department […]
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The Garda is in trouble, morale is low and there are numerous investigations into alleged incompetence and cover-ups. Village has been to the fore in detailing these delinquencies. The purpose of this article is something different: to highlight through a not untypical case the extent of the duty and the dangers of service. Overall, 88 […]
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After a couple of stuttering seasons, Season 6 of ‘Homeland’, which ended in April, pulled off a decently gripping story this time round. The writers make life difficult for themselves, as with its predecessor ‘24’, by making daring near-future predictions about the political reality that will be in place by the time the show airs. […]
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I don’t like ‘-isms’,” War of Independence veteran George Gilmore once said to me. “Heaven save me from the Marxists!”, an exasperated Karl Marx is reputed to have exclaimed. “All the ‘-isms’ are ‘-wasms’ ”, was a witticism following the collapse of East European communism in 1991. Nonetheless ‘-isms’, ideologies of one kind or another, […]
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Dante Alighieri opens ‘The Divine Comedy’ with the immortal lines: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita. (In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight path was lost) To the medieval mind […]
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As the Tribunal of Inquiry into protected disclosures and Certain Other Matters prepares for its opening statement from counsel in mid-June, Peter Charleton must be wondering what he’s let himself in for. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Supreme Court justice initially agreed to chair a commission of inquiry, a much more sedate […]
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Leo Varadkar consistently asserts that he does not believe in equality of outcome but in equality of opportunity. He sees himself as “right” or “either centre right or a higher class of liberal… somebody who believes in personal freedom, someone who believes in a political economy and in a free market as the best way […]
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Margaretta D’Arcy found herself jailed in January 2014 on the back of a protest she mounted at Shannon Airport in 2012. What was she protesting about? US troop aircraft using Shannon as a stopover on their journey to the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan among other things. D’Arcy is a rare stalewart against the steady […]
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Ireland is known for its literature, but not for its science fiction. There is not a great number of Irish writers in the genre, but it is a puzzling fact that major international authors such as James White and Bob Shaw are barely known in their native Ireland. Science fiction often imagines alternative life-worlds, which […]
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The death at 81 of Sean McEniff removes one of the last old-style political fixers from Ireland’s political landscape. McEniff was the co-owner of the Tyrconnell Group, a hotel chain. In 2007 Tyrconnell had merged with the Brian McEniff Hotel Group, owned by his brother, Brian McEniff, an All-Ireland-winning manager of Donegal football team, to […]
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The 2015 Summer refugee ‘crisis’ was the moment when refugees entered the European consciousness as an existential dilemma. Many European media asked if this influx represented the death of the Schengen line, the free travel zone and even of the European project. The pan-European furore that followed contributed to the Brexit vote. Indeed it is […]
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Launching a new newspaper is a tricky proposition at the best of times, but in the middle of historic declines in print circulation, as titles struggle to manage the transition to digital first publication, it seems downright bloody-minded. Yet that’s what News UK’s Dublin outlet has decided to do, with a daily print product following […]
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In the foyer collected a curious mix of tattooed half-American lefties, millionaires, NAMA refugees, journalists, politicians and the plummy denizens of Dalkey. Interestingly there did not seem to be a presence from Ireland’s hard left or even soft left, though Eamon Ryan was there. What they were there for, surprisingly, was Senator Bernie Sanders, recent […]
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While the consequences of the UK’s decision to leave the EU remain unclear, one thing is certain – the power and influence Ireland, North and South, will exercise over the final decision-making is limited. The hype in May of this year over apparent ‘concessions’ gained by Ireland from the EU, about an early resolution to […]
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Now that the long-awaited Commission of Investigation into the sale of Project Eagle has been conceded it remains to be seen which players will actually be on the pitch when the inquiry is finally convened. As predicted by Village several months ago, there was no chance that Enda Kenny or Michael Noonan would still be […]
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In the acknowledgement section of philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s last major book, he thanked his editorial assistant for a “pertinent critique” of the draft work. As he was then finishing up working for Ricoeur, in 2014, that editorial assistant, fresh-faced Emmanuel Macron, professed himself “like an excited child at the end of a show”. Macron, now […]
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In which Ireland gets an unthinktank, the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) founded by Professor Ray Bates and sponsoring talks by discredited contrarians attended by a few from Met Éireann
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Not entirely due to its own efforts, Aosdána has often been more associated with controversy and letters-page hullaballoos than its members’ artistic fruits – perhaps most darkly in 1997, after writer Francis Stuart’s horrific remark on Channel 4 that “the Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it”. Back then, […]
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