Irish Left Review - Joined up thinking for the Irish Left

So George Lee has resigned.  No doubt this will fill newspaper columns and blog posts with analysis of what this means for Fine Gael, Enda Kenny (will he be pushed?, the Government and, of course, George.  So far the one question that has not been answered - and not raised much either - is:  what were the policy disagreements that drove George out of Fine Gael and out of the Dail?  So far, all we have been treated to is, from George’s perspective, is that he didn’t have sufficient input into Fine Gael policy.  So far, however, he hasn’t touched upon the specifics of the type of policies he wanted input on.  Did he have proposals that were unacceptable to Fine Gael?  Were there Fine Gael policies unacceptable to him?  What would have been the result of such input?

Continue Reading »

Excerpts from works by novelists who didn’t even get a look-in at this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, won by Romanian-born German novelist and poet Herta Müller.

Eric thought nothing of knocking out a couple of dozen portraits a day. Lenin. Bruce Lee. Archbishop Makarios. JFK. Rolf Harris. What frustrated him was how easily it came to him. It wasn’t like he was autistic and so had some compensating social ineptitude to redeem his talent. On the contrary, he was socially ept. More ept than most, truth be told. That was one of the reasons why he received so many commissions: People loved him and they loved to buy his paintings. It had reached the stage where he could do them with his eyes closed, just name a celebrity, even a fictional one: Lolita, Oblomov, James Bond, Mister Darcy. He could come up with a convincing portrait in half an hour and not only would the buyer gratefully cough up the dosh but she’d practically insist that the likeness was uncanny, swear that this indeed was how the subject looked, even in the absence of a description in the text.

Continue Reading »

Here is a short seven-minute clip of Thomás Mac Giolla speaking at the Desmond Greaves School last September. I was there to record Brian Hanley and Mick Ryan for an audio podcast, but when Thomás got up to speak I grabbed my digital camera and filmed as much as I could before the memory card filled up.

By way of a small tribute, the man in his own words.

Continue Reading »

So the DUP and Sinn Féin have managed to negotiate their way through the disaster scenarios to a deal. No walkouts, elections or joint authority after all. The agreement is now out for consultation, so there will be plenty of opportunity to pick over the details over the next few weeks. The outline is:

• The devolution of policing and justice powers to the NI Executive and Assembly by 12th April; a decision on Monday about who which party will take the Justice Minister post, subject to a vote in the Assembly;

• A ‘new and improved framework’ for decisions on parading, via an OFMDFM working group, to be completed in three weeks and working with a set of five key principles included in the document today; new legislation by the end of the year and the Parades Commission to continue to operate until it is passed;

• An all-party working group on the functioning of the NI Executive;

• An all-party working group to review all outstanding matter and how they can be progressed, which presumably includes the Irish language issue and community relations.

Continue Reading »

Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, by John Gerassi, 2009, Yale.

Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making excuses for misdemeanours by blaming their genes, their upbringing, their parents, their gender, by finding all sorts of extenuating circumstances that shift the cause for their actions away from themselves. What these behaviours all have in common is that each constitutes an attempt to turn subject into object, to deny that the source of the action in question lies in the free choice of the individual by making the individual itself nothing more than an object at the mercy of forces outside of its own control. Sartre spends many many pages of his masterpiece Being and Nothingness trying to explain why humans should want to adopt such a position and drawing out the ontological pre-requisites for such an attitude to even be possible.

Continue Reading »

While DUP and Sinn Fein politicians in the Stormont coalition argue about policing and parades the economy of Northern Ireland is worsening by the day. Twenty thousand people lost their jobs in Northern Ireland 1n 2009.You’d think that our elected representatives might want to discuss that instead.

Last week while political leaders from the DUP and Sinn Féin were in Hillsborough Castle arguing over the small print of an agreement on policing and justice and parades, US companies Avaya and Baker Hughes announced hundreds of job losses.

Continue Reading »