Architects … are better able than many other professions to ride out recessions … They will use the lean times to think hard about the directions architecture might take when the good times roll once again. (Glancey, 2009) In August 2008 Ireland was the first EU country to declare itself officially in recession. The economic … Read more
THE LONG READ: In the last edition ‘How Irish Propaganda Operates’ explored how political and media duopolies uphold a dominant consensus of steady economic growth and rising rents, to the benefit of a shrinking, propertied elite. The Irish media sector is commented upon in a 2018 survey of press freedoms by Reporters Without Borders which found … Read more
In his autobiography– in itself an unusual exercise for a lawyer – Geoffrey Robertson QC, refers to himself as a ‘Baby Boomer’, and devotes a chapter to that generation. Although of Generation X myself, we share similar career trajectories in our commitment to human rights, which is probably why Geoffrey kindly sent me this biography, … Read more
There will ultimately occur conflagration of the whole world … nothing will remain but fire, by which, as a living being, and a god, once again a new world may be created and the ordered universe restored as before. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum ‘On the Nature of Gods’ (45BCE) I –Buddha in the … Read more
I recently sweated in a dark, low tent. Fifty other bodies squatted close to mine. Rich, pitch black darkness surrounding us. I sweated until I nearly passed out. Sometimes singing, sometimes close to vanishing in the damp air. Every now and then I glimpsed the faint glow of hot basalt stones steaming in the pit. … Read more
Stone can only offer you its stillness, The fact of its materiality. Its quiet unobtrusive existence that just is. It will never clamour for your attention. It could never hope to gain it anyway, competing with the hyper-stimulating technological landscape in which we dwell. As an artform scultpture has none of the bells and whistles … Read more
They turned up at the door dressed all in black, from their baseball caps and bomber jackets down to their DM boots, and they hustled in like hitmen or bouncers, or bailiffs, or the Old Bill or some kind of security syndicate, shifting on their feet, in uniform, black-gloved hands bearing black briefcases. One of … Read more
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a giant among philosophers, though she only published the first of her nineteen books at the age of fifty-nine, a feat which is unfathomable today in more than one respect. That anyone could start so late and produce so much, and so vibrantly (she produced in addition over two-hundred-and-eighty articles) is close to miraculous … Read more
I am sitting on a Frontier flight, a low-cost U.S. airline – basically the American Ryanair – my girlfriend beside me and Tiziano Terzani’s book, Lettere contro la guerra (Letters against the war, 2002) in my hands. We are flying to Seattle. I capture her attention by nudging her with my elbow to read and … Read more