Charlie Kirk’s Demise and the Shape of Conservatism to Come
Minor skirmishes on college campuses and within political subcultures are more often than not a bellwether for forthcoming national rifts. For this reason the ongoing immolation of the conservative media personality Charlie Kirk at the hands of small bands of...
The University Times’s Bugging Scandal and Ireland’s Emerging Media Class
“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.” -William Butler Yeats Remembering Buttergate For the campus reactionary,...
Brexit Is Pointless with Tories at the Helm
Post-war British life has largely been a stay of execution. The former superpower has largely stumbled through the past 70 years of societal rot that laid the seeds for the political crisis that is Brexit. The old adage stands true...
Defending Dev: Irish Neutrality in WW2 was justified
Dev’s Ireland dodges a bullet Amid the perpetual turmoil of Brexit, a historic occasion passed by almost unnoticed in the Irish public square. The Emergency Powers Act passed through the Oireachtas on the 3rd of September 1939 de facto commenced...
The Connolly Youth Movement is where the Left goes to die
“I have long been of opinion that the Socialist movement elsewhere was to a great extent hampered by the presence in its ranks of faddists and cranks, who were in the movement, not for the cause of Socialism, but because...
Central Bank Wages War on Dublin’s Cityscape
A relative oasis of tranquillity, Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance commemorates Ireland’s patriotic dead and provides some uplift in a benighted north inner city. Even if one has to step over half a dozen heroin addicts on the way there, through...
Introducing the Irish NGO Complex
The following is a multipart series examining the role of Ireland’s NGO (non-governmental organisation) sector in influencing journalism and policy formation, as well means to combat it. So far in the eyes of this author, criticism of the NGO lobby...
Time for YFG to Grow Some Teeth
Imagine the following scenario: a high ranking member of the Labour Party Youth group attends a foreign conference of international socialists. The conference, while banal in their eyes, plays host to a variety of far left Stalinists and Marxist-Lenninists sympathetic...
Irish Republicanism has Exhausted Itself
Twenty years of peace has done more to harm the fortunes of Irish republicanism than thirty years of warfare. Republicanism in 2019 finds itself between the Scylla and Charybdis, of bungling dissidents and a post-nationalist Sinn Féin. The botched murder...
EU-Mercosur Deal is a Symptom of Neoliberal Exhaustion
The culmination of twenty years of intermittent trade negotiations, the EU-Mercosur trade deal stands to open up fissures in Irish life. Aiming to liberalise trade barriers between the EU and the four membered South American bloc over a ten year...