Category: Politics
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...
The American Feds Have Busted the SPLC, So Why Does the Irish Independent Still Cite Them?
News of fraud charges and accusations of funding the very extremism it was designed to combat spell the probable doom of the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) as the American Department of Justice turned the screws on the once brawny...
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...
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...
Will Fianna Fáil’s Zoomer Golden Boys Oust Martin?
Reports of Micheál Martin’s political demise have been repeatedly overstated in the post-Covid period. The Leesideleader has managed to endure, despite recurring unease among Fianna Fáil’s upper ranks even up until the Jim Gavin fiasco. However, that run of resilience...
Ciarán O’Connor’s Iranian Bots: Time for Irish Media to Register ISD as Foreign Agents
The Irish Times op-ed pages have long enjoyed the rare distinction of irritating both left and right, largely through its habit of quietly importing the anxieties of British securocrats and repackaging them as native concerns. From ritualised scoldings about Ireland’s...
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...
Murphy Versus Molnárfi: Has Fuel Protests Broken Back of Left Populism
Dublin enters its third day of partial blockade and slow moving motorcades from hauliers and farmers alike as the government ponders the deployment of the Defence Forces to clear vital arteries. Responding to price spike in the wake of the...
His Grace’s Hills: Lismore and the Scandal of Absentee Ownership
The dispute in Lismore, County Waterford, has rightly provoked anger. Hill farmers, some of whose families have worked the same ground for generations, are facing proposed rent increases that in some cases rise to around €5,200. Farmers have described these...
The Irish Right’s Cart-Before-the-Horse Problem: A Reply to Cormac Lucey
The Irish Right has, in recent years, developed a curious habit. It has begun writing manifestos for a movement that does not yet exist. Policy papers are drafted. Platforms are proposed. Solutions are offered - often thoughtful, often detailed, sometimes...