Ireland's political and cultural magazine
The lacklustre prose might have tipped you off that all of the above items are from press releases, and so lack the sharpness good newspaper prose should have after subediting. But it’s not just PR-speak that distinguishes these news items. Each one was subject to a news embargo. News embargoes are not unknown in Ireland, […]
College campuses around the world are renowned as centres of free thinking, individuality, and acceptance of those from all walks of life. And they are; as long as you think the right way that is. In recent years, it has become more and more normalised for people to be silenced because their opinions are seen as […]
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Dublin’s North City fell out of fashion after the flight of the future Duke of Leinster to Kildare St and the Act of Union. That’s more than two centuries ago and the journey back has been slow. It suffered shocking poverty over succeeding generations, the collapse of world-class mansions into tenements, dereliction, the flight of nearly […]
By Frank Connolly. Former Minister for Health, Mary Harney, met one of the US firms at the centre of the cervical smear-testing scandal on three occasions in 2008 and 2009. Harney was Minister when US firm, Quest Diagnostics, secured the tender for smear testing in 2008 against the advice of leading Irish cytologists who questioned the […]
Harris asleep Young Simon Harris seems to think the women of Ireland will stay loyal to him if he just puckers up and adopts the mantra that it was all an honour and done for Mná na hÉireann. The night before the referendum he tweeted in what is being seen as a ‘Song of the […]
The myth that Irish people have a historically-rooted preference for home ownership is a long-standing cornerstone of Irish housing policy. The story goes that Irish people will always have an innate preference to own their homes, regardless of how attractive, secure and affordable renting is made. In the middle of the country’s worst housing crisis, […]
The paperback edition of Andrew Lownie’s highly regarded Stalin’s Englishman is now on sale with updates which did not appear in the hardback version. It is a riveting biography of the notorious Eton- and Cambridge-educated British spy and traitor Guy Burgess, bristling with new information based on first-hand sources including hitherto unpublished letters and files. Significantly, […]
A fortnight ago, I gave evidence at the Disclosures Tribunal. I spent almost four hours in the witness box in Dublin Castle over the course of two days. Most of what I said was the subject of a blackout by the establishment media, as I suspected it would be. For some time, I have been […]
All of life is on Abbey Street, the street where I work. Stepping out of the school, humming a tune to myself, in spite of the rain, heart beating with a secret joy, I imagine my self as a smooth stone, skimming over the the grey current of the day, towards the green granite horizon […]