Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Way back in 2004, I wrote an article for The Sunday Business Post, entitled ‘Play Boys, but few Play Women’ highlighting chronic gender imbalance in Irish Theatre, on the occasion of ‘Abbey One Hundred’, a virtually all-male programme celebrating the centenary the Abbey Theatre, (apart from one children’s play by Paula Meehan, and a shared […]
MoJoCon – the Mobile Journalism Conference which debuted in Dublin last year – has its roots almost a decade ago, when Glen Mulcahy, then working with RTE Nuacht, began experimenting with the camera on his Nokia N93 smartphone. “Video quality was atrociously bad, photographs were tiny, 1Mb was seen as huge, it was very much in […]
The Fianna Gael area rep was practisin’ his language, goin’ forward. He was glad you had asked the question but would you please let him finish. He didn’t interrupt you. Can you hear him at the back? He would have no hand, act or part in this coalition. That was a redline issue. Nothing was agreed […]
It is critical that the next Government have a credible and robust National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. This will depend on political will. The last number of months have been particularly difficult for Travellers and Traveller organisations. In October 2015 we witnessed the horrific deaths of 10 Travellers in a fire at a below-standard […]
The most extraordinary coalition formed in Ireland was the first one, in 1948. It involved Fine Gael and a then-new party headed by Sean McBride, Clann na Poblachta. The Clann was a lively mixture of liberals, left-wingers and Republicans with a deep immersion in the IRA. The surprise with the Clann was that its youthful enthusiasm […]
There is something quaint about Conor Lenihan assessing the life of Charlie Haughey, the man who stole money from the fund for his father’s liver transplant and then fired his father as Tánaiste and Minister for Defence. Lenihan has pieced together a mixture of his own memories of the former Taoiseach and anecdotes that his […]
The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 2015 had passed through the Seanad and was before the Dáil. However, unfortunately the Bill will not be passed through the Dáil before the 2016 General Election. It is now vital to ensure that it is restored to the Dáil at the same stage it had reached very early […]
We’re living in a “rape culture”, even though the term seems to annoy some people. So let’s just say we’re living in a culture in which rape is routinely trivialised, where victims are frequently blamed for its occurrence and their testimony is denied and ridiculed, and where the onus is placed on them to prevent rape […]
In 2011 we wrote in this space, “You would think from our recent history of some of the most notoriously bad governance on the planet, that we would have learnt that our political classes need to be replaced. In fact, this election time we see no new ideas”. Sadly democracy in Ireland needs an overhaul every bit […]