Artist of the Month – Héctor Castells

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”38″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the Month: Hector Castells”] These poems belong to the Puddle Heroes series, by the hectic fish.   Puddle heroes is a collection of pictures of puddles with people on it, people not necessarily drowned as much as free floating They are the icons of all the rhymes that follow. All … Read more

Fine Gael’s Habitat Denial

The idea of home is a recurring Irish preoccupation – níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.[i] This can be traced to a history of Famine dispossession, and a subsequent Land War. The Irish Constitution still commits the State to supporting women as home-makers.[ii] It perhaps explains the vehemence of recent criticism, from across the … Read more

HAP-less – Addressing the Needs of Homeless in Temporary Accommodation

Brilliant white cinder-block walls and pastel-coloured floors. In between, lightweight partition walls carve up what is essentially a warehouse, and inspire confusion in short tangential corridors. Varying odours and temperatures permeate the air, where a multitude of individuals experiencing homelessness have the fortune of a roof over their head. Some move quickly, others slowly, some … Read more

Getting Growing

It was exciting to meet the enthusiasm at the inaugural meeting of Talamh Beo, a grassroots organisation of farmers, growers and land-based workers on the island of Ireland. It aims to ensure a living landscape, where people and ecosystems thrive together. Inspiration comes from the Landworkers’ Alliance (UK), which in the five years of its … Read more

BREXIT – A Poem

Once I had finished it I didn’t understand my own poem, so how could you? There had been a moment when, possessed by a sort of deftness, I had made choices about matters such as line length but now all that had left me. I was confused. The intriguing question is what path led me … Read more

‘Discourse of Pollution’ from the ‘Trump of the Tropics’

The use of xenophobic language by Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, known as the ‘Trump of the tropics’, reinforces a dangerous narrative in which refugees and migrants are portrayed as threats to national security, writes humanitarian worker Bruna Kadletz. FLORIANÓPOLIS, Brazil – In his first official visit to the White House, Brazil’s new Far Right President … Read more

The Limits of Law

‘What is law?’ This is a fundamental question posed at the outset of any course in the philosophy of law. The standard form of response includes that it is a system of rules, according to a tradition known as legal positivism. Such is a ‘black letter’ lawyer, and Anglo-American approach. This is a product of … Read more