The recent multitude of events commemorating the centenary of the 1916 rising has provided ample opportunity to reconsider and admire the original wording of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness […]
1,695 total views, 3 views today
If there’s been one new idea introduced into the discourse by the 2016 commemorations, we haven’t registered it. The Rising was an irrational response to a colonialist foe. The proper approach would have been to analytically survey the strengths and weaknesses of the occupying power, and to have respectively avoided and exploited them with the […]
1,726 total views, 3 views today
The two big parties no longer think big. The bigger parties attract an older (more reliable?) vote while the apparently more radical parties capture the younger and more socially disadvantaged vote The elephant in the room at the so-far abortive meetings in Leinster House to form a viable government is the presence of a once […]
1,623 total views, 4 views today
What was Richard Bruton thinking of when he referred to setting up a “world class” service, to establishing a new entity that is “all about making Ireland the best small country to do business in”, when he launched a “new era for employment rights and industrial relations”? The answer, surprisingly, is the Workplace Relations Commission […]
1,833 total views, 3 views today
1,476 total views, 3 views today
1,476 total views, 3 views today
The former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds once said that an Irish General Election was a series of 41 constituency by-elections. The vagaries of our proportional representation system mean that a modern Irish election can throw up all kinds of results. The landscape of Irish politics has been thrown into even greater uncertainty by the extraordinary destruction […]
1,738 total views, 3 views today
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. […]
1,912 total views, 3 views today
