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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. […]
13,419 total views, 5 views today
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 […]
11,908 total views, 6 views today
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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 […]
44,979 total views, 6 views today
