All posts by Peter Irvine

Dublin City and the Cost of Not Planning

The central issue to be taken from this data is not whether demographic change is desirable or undesirable. It is whether the Leinster House Government planned for it and its consequences. In Dublin Central, where housing need, homelessness and population...

/ 07/06/2026

Instability in Britain, A Border Poll in Ireland: Britain’s EU Reset and the Border Poll Mirage

Starmer’s reset with the European Union is not romance. It is repair-work. Britain wants easier trade, smoother regulation, security co-operation, a veterinary agreement here, a goods arrangement there and all the little devices by which a state may edge back...

/ 25/05/2026

In Galway West Ireland’s Fractured Populist Right Begins to Find Form

Noel Thomas: Independent Ireland’s Opening in Galway West The more immediate electoral threat to the old party system in Galway West comes from Noel Thomas and Independent Ireland. Thomas is not an outsider in the sense of being unknown locally:...

/ 20/05/2026

Dublin Central By Election: Is the Inner City Primed for Migration Backlash?

Dublin Central will go to the polls on 22 May to elect one TD, following the vacancy left by Paschal Donohoe. The official notice of poll lists fourteen candidates, including Malachy Steenson, standing as a non-party candidate, alongside PSF (officially...

/ 18/05/2026

Fox Hunting at Stormont? Inside Sinn Féin’s 2026 Ard Fheis

On 24th and 25th April 2026, Provisional Sinn Féin gathered in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast for an Ard Fheis that revealed much of the party’s present condition. This was not the gathering of a revolutionary Republican movement nor even...

/ 07/05/2026

Scotland Beyond the SNP: Speaking with Alliance to Liberate Scotland

The forthcoming Scottish election is unlikely to be decided by smaller pro-independence formations. Yet some of the more interesting currents in Scottish politics are found outside the familiar SNP-dominated landscape. The Alliance to Liberate Scotland and Sovereignty point to frustration...

/ 03/05/2026

Scotland’s 2026 Election and the Cracking of the Yookay-An Irish Republican Perspective

For Irish readers, the most important feature of the forthcoming Scottish election may not be the familiar question of who forms the next devolved government at Holyrood, but the broader constitutional mood it reveals. Increasingly, the SNP’s politics are being...

/ 30/04/2026

Halal or Kosher? Religious Animal Slaughter in Ireland

For years, the issue of religious slaughter has tended to be discussed in Ireland in the broadest and crudest possible terms. Halal and kosher are lumped together. Animal welfare concerns are dismissed as bigotry by some and treated as self-evidently...

/ 26/04/2026

Continuity Under Strain: How Irish Republicanism Navigated the Emergency

The period between 1938 and the end of the Second World War represents one of the most severe tests faced by the Irish Republican tradition in the twentieth century. It was not a period of decisive advance, nor of final...

/ 19/04/2026

National Sabotage? Blame Green Mania Not Truckers for Fuel Unrest

The fuel protests now entering their fourth day are being treated by the 26-County government as a law-and-order headache, a public-order nuisance and, in Micheál Martin’s words, an act of “national sabotage”. That line is not just arrogant. It is...

/ 11/04/2026