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Introduction. In the very early 1970s, Brigadier (later General Sir) Frank Kitson and his colleagues were of a mind to confront the IRA, and only the IRA. Kitson’s superior, Lord Michael Carver, revealed in his memoirs that “a direct armed clash between the army and the UDA, when the former was already facing the IRA, […]
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The interdepartmental Rubik’s cube of work permissions for migrants yields a passive income for the official account owners from the labour of vulnerable non-European workers who have to risk life-and-limb while working without insurance, leading the basic payment per delivery for a Deliveroo worker in Ireland to drop from €4.39 to €2.90
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On the day of the local elections Anton McCabe looks at the prospects for revival of the Assembly.
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Why Greens are blue: the facts show the Greens’ record in Government is deplorable.
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As he prepares to address Seanad Éireann, Frank Connolly looks at the record of the former Taoiseach
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MacSharry is very adamant that he is “his own man” and, in a strange way, given his strong footprint pedigree in Fianna Fail, he may in fact be better off being outside of the party. He has surfaced a very real issue in policy terms for the party he once belonged to — the precise […]
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By Michael Smith.
This article appears in Village Magazine, May-June 2023. It was written by Michael Smith and not Rory O’Sullivan. Apologies for the editorial error.
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Biden seemed to acknowledge the American future no longer looks as good as when my grandparents left Galway. By Victoria Costello. Towards the end of my forthcoming novel, Orchid Child, which explores intergenerational legacies and debts in an Irish-American family, an American teenager is walking in a wooded East Galway with an older Irish relative […]
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The Information Commissioner’s Office has just upheld a complaint about the infamous bombing of McGurk’s bar in Belfast. The complaint was made against Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI). It concerned the discovery of the covert British Army “ambush observation post” in the vicinity of McGurk’s Bar on the night of the Massacre. The overwhelming odds […]
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1. France came to terms with its most shameful military scandal, the framing of Capt. Dreyfus. Britain still clings to the wreckage of its attempt to destroy Capt. Wallace after 50 years of lies and deception. L’Affaire Dreyfus convulsed France for over a decade, 1894-1906. The scandal has come to symbolise an injustice perpetrated by […]
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Dodgy Damien English, as Junior Minister (2017-21), and Dave Walsh, now ‘retired’ former head of the planning department, were among the range of officials and Ministers in the Housing Department who served to keep Gerard Convie’s allegations about corruption in Donegal planning out of the public domain.
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And O’Brien is benefiting from favourable coverage in the paper for his precipitate U-turning Planning Bill which embraces Bord Pleanála, social housing, judicial review and the foreshore The Minister of Housing, Darragh O’Brien has been scrambling of late to hustle through the passage of the still fast-evolving unfinished but critical Planning and Development […]
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Friday, November 18th, 2022.
Friday, November 18th, 2022 Peace came in the door and sat down beside me and said how glad it was to see me, genuinely, and to finally meet my wife, I knew I must take its hand though I did not know who I would be in the absence of all I had built its […]
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By J Vivian Cooke. The Planning and Development and Foreshore (Amendment) Bill 2022 is currently — precipitously — accelerating through the Houses of the Oireachtas. In part, it will facilitate the appointment of Oonagh Buckley as interim head of An Bord Pleanála (ABP). Village has expressed grave and detailed concerns about this process. […]
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BORD PLEANÁLA: O’BRIEN REVERTS TO RAY BURKE ERA LEGISLATIVE ETHOS Media ignore Department of Housing’s disarray over how to appoint a new Chairperson to guide discredited planning appeals body By J Vivian Cooke and Michael Smith Ireland’s crisis-raddled planning appeals board, An Bord Pleanála (ABP), is an independent, statutory, quasi-judicial body that deals with appeals […]
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Dylan. By Kevin Barrington.
There was that nervous anticipation as we sat down in the Point. It’s Bob Dylan after all. And at 81 he is still challenging. There’s none of that reverence that bordered on the mawkish that greeted Leonard Cohen. But Leonard had almost become a legacy act. While Bob was still pushing boundaries leaving an audience […]
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The Man in Room Fourteen In one crucial respect, is like everyone else. He’s a working diagnosis about whom we know both far too much and nothing like enough The man in room fourteen spends twenty four hours either going to the toilet or not going at all; is never a happy medium for happy […]
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Mr Cogito Considers The Side Effects after Dr. Janusz Crawczyk Baldness and shortness of breath a sudden urge to vomit on coats your own and other people’s. Drymouth, brittle nails, a tendency to be not very good at driving fork-lift trucks and to become even worse at pole vaulting than you already were. Explosive […]
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Construction educators ‘Common Knowledge’ promote empowerment to improve the environment, quality of life and the community. Their Co-Founder and lead instructor is on the television every Wednesday If inadequate housing remains Ireland’s biggest problem, new policy needs to be developed and implemented without delay. Build School “Within Common Knowledge, lies the potential to empower […]
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Sky News says that the resignation speech of Ms Truss lasted ninety seconds. For some it must have seemed like a lifetime, for others it just flew by. By any standard, it was grim. None of her colleagues appeared with her, not even Larry the No 10 mouser showed up. Her attempt at an […]
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This play is brilliantly produced and performed. It is hardly uncommon these days to have a work of art whose central theme is dementia, but it is rare to see one this good. What distinguishes Lost Lear is the quality of its writing and production: the play is a carefully constructed piece of theatre with […]
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New evidence has emerged about the UVF’s bombing of McGurk’s Bar in Belfast in December 1971. The explosion caused the entire structure of the premises to collapse, killing fifteen Catholic civilians – including two children – and wounding seventeen more. It was the deadliest attack in Belfast during the Troubles. Brigadier (later General Sir) Frank […]
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Perhaps Edna O’Brien is the greatest Irish author alive. ‘‘Country Girls’, Ireland’s ‘Bell Jar’, remains as gripping and elusive now as it must have been when it was first published. Bookshelves all over the country are crammed with inferior imitations by younger authors. O’Brien always exercises tyrannical verbal control of her writing. In […]
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Rory O’Sullivan reviews The Birdwatcher’s Trip to Alpha Centauri This show is highly ambitious and, in many ways, daft: it takes a lot of risks, most of which pay off. Sometimes it is so absorbing it could make you forget to breathe; sometimes it is warm and relaxed, sometimes bizarre. Its biggest problem is […]
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The writer, David Toms (from Waterford, living in Norway), has a rare congenital heart defect called transposition of the great arteries. For people with transposition the aorta and pulmonary artery are inverted, so that much of the blood running through their bodies is deoxygenated. As children this turns their skin blue at the […]
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1. An amazing coincidence. The latest report into the squalid MI5/6-Kincora Boys’ Home child sex abuse scandal was released on 19 September 2022- the same day as the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. The error strewn Hart Report was released during Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. The Hart report received little or no real […]
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Introduction. Queen Elizabeth II received briefings from fifteen chiefs of the British Secret Service during her 70-year reign, much of it about Ireland. The briefings undoubtedly covered a wide spectrum from Charles Haughey, the bogeyman of Irish politics – as the UK saw it – to Martin McGuinness and the murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten. […]
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Two arts and culture festivals in Dublin this month Taking place this month in Dublin are two major arts and culture festivals – the Dublin Fringe Festival and Dublin Theatre Festival – both returning with a full programme of live events. The Dublin Fringe Festival runs from 10 September – 25 September. The […]
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Today, September 5 2022, all over Little England, the blackberry-jam-making sessions of the local Women’s Institutes were paused shortly before 12.00 noon. The tea urns and their cosies had been readied in anticipation. The members seated themselves before the old portable televisions used on such occasions, to watch the anointing of Liz Truss MP as […]
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The Information Research Department (IRD) of Britain’s Foreign Office sought to smear the victims of Bloody Sunday and the McGurks bar bomb atrocity. They even went so far as to attack a group of British politicians by linking them to a campaign for justice for the victims of Bloody Sunday. To the IRD, any association […]
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Introduction. As the lights begin to go off in Europe, the State continues to abdicate responsibility for national defence and is failing to fulfil its key obligations as an independent entity in international law. The geopolitical situation continues to rapidly deteriorate yet the government is engaged in a massive PR exercise ostensibly celebrating the centenary […]
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On 4 December 8:45 p.m., a UVF gang set out on a bombing mission. One of those involved was Robert James Campbell. The UVF bomb exploded outside a small pub in Belfast called McGurk’s, a cosy place where Catholics and Protestants from the same neighbourhood – all of whom knew each other well – met […]
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1. The Classified Garda Files. The information provided by the brothers, John and Pat Barry, confirms that the Garda (Irish police) had a checkpoint at the gate of Classiebawn castle in August 1977. Garda security appears – by some accounts – to have been downgraded in 1979, shortly before Mountbatten was murdered by the Provisional […]
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Irish is experiencing a period of growth in its official use. It is a full official and working language of the European Union since 1 January 2022. Every regulation, directive and decision of the EU is now enacted and published in Irish at the same time and with the same status as the versions in […]
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“Two babies from one family, ‘gone’: Tusla unable to locate records despite ‘extensive’ search” — thejournal.ie 2 August 2022 Every day I receive at least one – and sometimes two or three – Google Alerts relating to ‘Irish Mother and Baby Homes’ [1] This edited collection of essays was published on 21 May 2022. On […]
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How it started: A Fianna Fáil TD appearing on the national platform as low-key, unimpressive to the point of being insipid, and just a bit greasy. Yet this TD has the good fortune to own a residential property in Dublin City – that he himself doesn’t use, despite working in Dublin as a TD and […]
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[pdf-embedder url=”https://villagemagazine.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Comedy.pdf”
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It’s just Daft
Village has previously expressed concerns about how property websites compile their quarterly market surveys and the uncritical frenzy they provoke in the media. (See Village Magazine, March 2022 Issue or https://villagemagazine.ie/donkeys-led-by-lyons/ ). Despite the latest reports again clogging the headlines and editorial, what is being passed off as analysis amounts to little more than reproducing […]
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More than four decades ago, Chris the Kid Schroeder and I tried desperately to avoid wetting ourselves in a cinema whilst watching a 1950s promotional film about Dallas. The absurd shots of big buildings, huge hats, and sparkling Lincoln Continentals were accompanied by a repetitive ditty: They make ‘em bigger and better in Dallas! It […]
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Save Moore Street Concert
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Introduction. The brutality displayed by David Cleary (Soldier F) and Ron Cook (Soldier G) of 1 Para on Bloody Sunday in Derry on 30 January 1972 was not an aberration. After murdering a string of unarmed civilians, they were taken to Fort George where they beat up a group of innocent prisoners including a priest. […]
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Dublin City Council (DCC) has numerous functions: from housing; cleaning and maintaining our streets; and authorising urban developments. One of their most important functions is planning enforcement – this means that they it has a duty to police our planning laws effectively. DCC has a mixed record on planning enforcement but, when it comes […]
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Turn off the heat. Instead, warm yourself by setting fire to your free weekly copy of The Galway Advertiser. Be sure and arm yourself with extra by liberating them from your neighbours’ letter boxes. Sit in the dark, preferably alone, so you don’t spread the pox to anyone else, wearing a cheap pair of […]
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Village Idiot: Joe Manchin
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On Bloody Friday, the Provisional IRA detonated 19 bombs across the city of Belfast, killing 9 people and injuring 130 – most of whom were women and children. Paper Trail discovered secret British military logs in London and “secured their release following prolonged information battles and Public Interest Tests. The organisation made the secret files […]
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On most Saturday mornings I am incensed by the op ed piece by Charles Moore in the London edition of the Daily Telegraph. My wife questions why I continue to read him and allow my blood to boil over my tea and toast. Moore is like marmite (of which I am fond). Part of my […]
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Originally published July 2021
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Housing of cards
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Agri-Cultural Change
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The Constitution of Ireland declares Ireland to be a sovereign independent democratic state. This declaration of sovereignty means that the State is not subject to any power or government. But sovereignty to be recognised in International Law brings with it rights and duties. International law is based upon the concept of the state and the […]
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In this post Christopher Stanley, Litigation Consultant, KRW LAW LLP, review “Overruled: Confronting Our Vanishing Democracy in 8 Cases” by Sam Fowles (London: One World) “The job of the prime minister in difficult circumstances, when he has been handed a colossal mandate, is to keep going – and that’s what I’m going to do” (Boris Johnson […]
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Stalker report nobbled 30 years ago
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‘A founder of the East Tyrone Brigade, Hughes was the key planner of the two most successful prison escapes staged by the IRA of the 1970s’ ‘The springing of three IRA men from the rooftop of Mountjoy prison by helicopter caused a sensation, as well as inspiring a hit ballad by the Wolfe Tones’ […]
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While they would seem worlds apart, their fates were all the more alike. This refers of course to the tragedies which befell young Arlene Arkinson and Richard Kerr starting when both of them were youths and culminating in two destroyed lives. Arlene was a pleasant teenage girl who seemed well-liked by her family and friends […]
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Fontaines DC have become part of rock’s rich tapestry, living proof that rock’s canvass is far from complete. Countless band set out to bring something new to the party. Most fail. Fontaines deliver in spades. Better again, they do so with an intelligence that permeates the lyrics and music. The group kicked up a sonic […]
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From: kevin higgins <kphiggins@hotmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 8, 2022 7:56:21 AM To: Martin Doyle <martindoyle@irishtimes.com> Subject: For Martin Hi Martin, hope all is well and good your side. As you may know, I have a new poetry collection – my sixth – out next week. Polina Cosgrave is launching the book in Galway. Would you be at […]
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Tá borradh tagtha agus ag teacht faoi stádas agus úsáid na Gaeilge sa saol oifigiúil. Is teanga oifigiúil oibre den Aontas Eorpach í gan mhaolú, cíos, cás ná cathú ón 1ú Eanáir 2022. Feasta achtófar agus clófar gach rialachán, treoir agus cinneadh den Aontas as Gaeilge ag an am céanna agus ar aon dul leis […]
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These days normally we divide the world into halves: one which is inside our imagination, and another which is real and outside of us. The first half includes things like love, sentiment, beauty, laughter, and is necessary for our own sanity but a dangerous falsity; the second is bare and severe, a […]
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It’s the IT, BoI Springsteen wasn’t Bank of Ireland’s only recent IT debacle. What is the point of Bank of Ireland? Exactly what, or who, is Bank of Ireland for? Certainly not for ordinary customers if they also happen to be Bruce Springsteen fans. On Friday, the bank’s app crashed just as tickets for […]
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The 2010 Report of the Saville Enquiry describes much of what happened in Derry on Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972). Various commentaries and later publications have added further information, some of it of a nature that the authorities must have hoped would never be revealed. It seems however that the ferocity of the slaughter that […]
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Kendrick Lamar is one of the most popular high-brow artists. He is one of very few people in history whose work during their lifetime has been at once widely listened to (nearly 20 million hits already for the top tracks of this album on Spotify) and deeply scrutinised: every lyric, every note and harmony […]
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Why Solar In their book, ‘The Menace of Atomic Energy’,published nearly 50 years ago, Ralph Nader and John Abbotts revealed to readers that the person most responsible for developing American nuclear reactors, Dr Alvin Weinberg, admitted he would prefer solar energy if its cost could be brought down to less than 2.5 times the cost […]
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The ownership and governance arrangements for the new National Maternity Hospital (NMH) are fraught with risk for future generations of women in Ireland. The board structure of the new hospital makes it liable to capture and control by the 3/3/3 membership structure. The NMH will have minority representation of only three out of nine […]
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Putin’s 9 May speech in Red Square came and went, without any new theatre opening up. This may indicate a change in strategy to limit the kinetic war to Donbas but he’s made it quite clear that, in his world view, the culpable protagonist, is NATO /USA. By moving away from military rhetoric his speech, along […]
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Donkeys led by Lyons.
Daft: the solution to the housing crisis depends on facts-led public-policy but we need to be discriminating about the facts chosen and who chooses them, even when it’s Ronan Lyons. By J Vivian Cooke.
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After an unedifying week marked by an unrelenting stream of propaganda following the unexpected deferral of the Cabinet decision, yesterday’s poll in the Sunday Independent shows that the plurality of respondents (excluding ‘uncertains’), 45 per cent, believe there will be religious interference in the new hospital. Predictably, the role of offshore intermediaries, Stembridge Ltd and […]
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The article which featured Anderton was about John Stalker and a number of other honourable English police officers and soldiers who had tried to do the right thing in Ireland. The relevant section read as follows: The late John Stalker, the former Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, investigated the RUC’s shoot to kill programme […]
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Number 17 Gilford Park , Sandymount, in Dublin 4 is one semi-detached half of a structure adjoining number 15 which is in registered in the ownership of a Mr Anthony Duffy. The sale of No 17 went through in the second half of 2021 for €960,000 . It was sold to Caroline Barron and her […]
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NAMA In 2009 I was one of four Sinn Féin TDs in the Dáil when NAMA was set up. Ireland’s ‘bad bank’ was characterised then and since, by some, as the scam of the century because it would bailout billionaire developers while at the same time many ordinary people would get evicted from their homes. […]
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About ten years ago I attended a poetry reading, at a location I will not disclose here, in a vast hotel conference room. One of the poets was a nearly great poet, the other not so much. One was wearing a tweed jacket, or at least my memory chooses to dress them in tweed; the […]
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In 2018, the New York Times named ‘An Octoroon’ by the American playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins the second-best play since ‘Angels in America’ (putting first for some reason the excruciating ‘Topdog/Underdog’) – but despite this, the play is scintillating and worth seeing. It is complicated to summarise, but essentially, Jacobs-Jenkins reworks a Nineteenth-Century play called […]
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The Religious Sisters of Charity have now transferred the assets held by them in St Vincent’s Healrhcare Group to a Catholic holding company which was set up by offshore specialists with links to the Panama Papers. The British Virgin Islands have just made the news with the arrest of their Premier in Miami […]
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The campaign for the truth about the infamous McGurk’s bar bombing has uncovered the existence of a covert intrigue hatched by the British Army’s counter-insurgency (i.e., dirty tricks) guru, Brigadier Frank Kitson, and the RUC, to conceal the truth about the UVF’s bomb attack massacre at McGurk’s bar fifty years ago. Kitson and the RUC […]
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• An Bord Pleanála’s manifest ethical weakness in perspective • The planning appeals board, An Bord Pleanála, has been brought into disrepute by its deputy chairperson’s property deals, by his criminal failed declarations of property interests and mishandled conflicts of interests, and by his receiverships. He must go. System of Planning Appeals […]
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By Eddie Hobbs What is Putin’s big Disruption Strategy? To find out I’ve been engaging with geopolitical experts. I don’t dwell here upon the effectiveness of the mounting responses to Putin’s aggression. He faces a coalition of overlapping opponents: the EU, UK, NATO, USA – many countries and multinational corporations. The military strategy of […]
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Lawbreaking, some misconceptions and the fundamentals of the original Garda complaint
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Rory O’Sullivan watched Bridgerton Season 2 yet wonders why anyone would bother. A period-piece represents the past and by representing dominates it. In general, the past survives only mythologically, as a collection of loose figures and attitudes in the present. In a period-piece, the prevailing attitude imbues these figures with itself and alters the past […]
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In Spring, when I was born, Ireland was full of daffodils: in the city in window-boxes and the front-gardens of houses, apartment-buildings, and on the stony small ridges beside footpaths as well as here and there in forests and uncultivated fields. I have always identified strongly with the daffodil. I have never said so […]
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By David Burke. This article was first published on 2 July 2021. It is republished to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lord Widgery’s infamous report which defamed the victims of Bloody Sunday and exculpated those who murdered them. 1. Brigadier Frank Kitson subverts the law. Brigadier Frank Kitson of the British Army […]
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Everywhere Salvatore of Lucan’s art combines a rigorous and searching honesty about all the most characteristic aspects of a single place, time and self with the intense feeling of a world which is not that place and time – even his name: as much serious as joking, as much old as completely new. […]
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6 Ormond Quay Upper Dublin 7 D07H324 The Secretary An Bord Pleanála 64 Marlborough St Dublin 1 D01 V902 14 April 2022. By email only to bord@pleanala.ie, communications@pleanala.ie Re: the imperative of An Bord Pleanála pursuing a criminal complaint under Sections 147-149 and 156-157 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 (the “Act”) against […]
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Dolphin Square VIP sex abuse. Dolphin Square was opened in London’s Pimlico in 1936. It soon became a magnet for all sorts of scandal and intrigue: espionage, political, sexual, not to mention mysterious deaths. ‘Scandal at Dolphin Square’ provides a riveting account of the lives of a rolling maul of fascinating and complex characters. As […]
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a few hundred pages of hard books – or else a few minutes with the sculptures of Giacometti Theorists try to understand the world as if unfolding in a giant process with certain rules, whereas for artists the point is to observe it as a spectacle of which any thoughts and representations are just […]
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In poetry the nearest figure to Patrick Kavanagh is Charles Baudelaire. Both were often destitute. Both found a verse that was above all music, not aspiring to music, like Walter Pater said of every art-form, but music itself made of words and because of it more profound. For both men the heart […]
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The debate in Ireland about joining NATO, or some sort of an EU military arrangement, is now on the political agenda like never before. Pro-neutrality advocates argue that the country is sleep walking into a military alignment of one sort or another with Western military powers. They point to the fact that US air force […]
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One of Greek tragedy’s foremost concerns is the contemplation of polarities. In a part of Sophocles’s Antigone, Ismene tells her sister, “You have a warm heart for cold things”, In ancient Greek culture, warm things are alive, cold ones dead; but for Antigone, now, the fire of her life and self has its source in […]
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The Media’s treatment of the lies: an epic scandal ignored. It was March 1998. The RTE journalist Geraldine Harney informed me that I was to be dismissed by the ISME directors Peter Faulkner and Eoghan Hynes. She was doing the decent thing. Nevertheless, it was a preposterous suggestion and I told her so. However, in […]
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In a whitewashed barn decked out with Ulster flags, Union Jacks and pictures of the Queen, their leader in charge of this meeting sat at an old table. He pressed a button on a tape recorder. A voice boomed out: I address you as the commander in chief of the organisation, Silent Defenders. Author Ciarán […]
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After an inexplicable delay of five years, the public apology recommended in the final report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry will finally be made by the Northern Ireland Assembly (on 11 March). The announcement of the apology has been received with little enthusiasm by some of the abuse victims who say that they will […]
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From Village Magazine Mar-APR 2022
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Putin: Village Idiot March 2022
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