frankarmstrong To understand the origins of the Irish Housing Crisis we also need to look beyond our shores, and excavate the substrate of the modern global financial order. This will reveal a slow journey towards the neoliberal financialisation of property as an asset today – overwhelmingly bought and sold regardless of the needs of society at … Read more
As a UCD undergraduate I recall Professor Tom Bartlett likening Irish history to a pint of Guinness, ‘with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth everything else, including all the political movements.’ Old habits die hard. The issue of property remains a paramount concern. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private … Read more
Dublin Bay South by-election candidate Peter Dooley has an impressive track record of fighting for a just society, especially through the Dublin Renters’ Union, and unlike many on the left in Ireland, has drawn attention to the devastation to ordinary people’s lives caused by the longest lockdown in Europe. This by-election in Dublin Bay South … Read more
The appeal of exotic cuisines and esoteric diets has done little to diminish bread’s status as the primary foodstuff of the Western world, and many areas besides. Symbolic as the ‘staff of life’ and ubiquitous, the Oxford English Dictionary describes it in wholesome simplicity as a ‘well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading, and … Read more
Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of … Read more
So-called ‘ZeroCovid’ is a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to the virus, promising to eliminate community transmission in Ireland. The concept has gained traction among young people, especially, desperate for an end to a seemingly endless cycle of lockdowns, and others worried by the danger posed by the disease itself. The original ‘zero-tolerance’ policy is identified with Donald … Read more
The Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has unleased another wave of soul-searching in Ireland. How could a society claiming to be ‘Christian’ have failed to protect, and even to have harmed, its most vulnerable – unmarried mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children? The harrowing accounts fit within a wider … Read more
The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1862). The quote above is from a work of fiction, but the author was drawing on a memory of four years imprisonment, following conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle – a Russian literary … Read more
The idea that our society might be moving in a fundamentally bad direction is an extremely difficult one to grapple with. We are aware that society is deeply flawed, sometimes even to the point of cynicism; and yet there is a certain basic soundness in the orientation of our society which we assume as a … Read more
By the time I got to Lenny’s place he was pacing up and down out front; his unusually frantic movement a poor advertisement for the stuff he was peddling; the stuff I was there to collect. He had his navy blue Boy Scout shorts on with a sleeveless t-shirt that allowed tanned biceps to stick … Read more