Category: Politics
The Overton Hourglass
June, 2003: shortly after take-off, an ultralight aircraft crashes near Caro, Michigan. The pilot is a newlywed man in his early forties. He dies in the wreckage. His name was Joseph Overton. In the world of politics, however, Joseph Overton...
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...
Oughterard and What Comes Next
In the small Galway village of Oughterard, locals are celebrating the reversal of a decision to establish a Direct Provision centre in their locality at the Connemara Gateway Hotel. The reversal came as a result of their round-the-clock protest centred...
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...
The Political Cudgel
In a recent political podcast, Radicalisation and the Amplification of Extremism Online, the Irish Times make clear that they have no intention of allowing “Gemma O’Doherty or any of her supporters” on their current affairs podcasts. One would presume that...
Victory or Greed: Rejecting ‘Respectable’ Conservatism
The Irish people have possessed an indomitable will to endure. We have survived genocide and forced famine, rebellion and repression, invasion and suppression, plantation and a host of other evils employed by imperialists to destroy nations like our own. And...
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...
The Sunday Business Post’s Brown Scare
{This article is written in response to the Sunday Business Post piece “Ireland’s Alt Right: The people building an empire online” 16/6/19 detailing the apparent rise of an online far right presence in Ireland supported by foreign actors} If Ireland...