Category: Ireland
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,...
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...
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...
Fake Controversy and the High Court’s Citizenship Ruling
On the 18th of July a calamity happened, or so the immigration lawyers would have you believe. Mr Justice Max Barrett, in a landmark High Court ruling, held that the Minister for Justice could not offer exemptions to a clause...
Ireland’s Emerging Rightist Media Nexus
This is intended to be a resource on Irish-oriented right-wing media platforms, most typically YouTube channels, but also encompassing other formats. There is an undeniable thirst for information sources outside of the narrow sliver of ideological choices available from the...
Thoughts on Irish Taxation
There is much discussion about the tax code; whether it is broad based and whether we should be running surpluses. It is assumed that surpluses are the definitive measure of fiscal responsibility, though this isn't always the case. Governments ran...
Welcome to the Metrostate
Just over one hundred years ago, Patrick Pearse famously stepped out of Dublin’s GPO to read the Proclamation to a somewhat bemused Dublin populace. Pearse’s reading of the Proclamation is generally viewed as the founding act of a new independent...
Acht na Gaeilge: Free State Failures for the Six Counties
Free State Failures: The Irish language occupies a schizophrenic place within the policymaking and public consciousness of the 26 counties. While institutionalised at an educational and legislative level and generally supported by the public at large, the language barely registers...