“The point about a free press as presided over by O’Reilly’s INM is that editorial content is a matter for journalists, not proprietors.”
So says Eamon Dunphy in his April 12th Irish Times article about the battle between Denis O’Brien and Tony O’Reilly for the ownership of Independent News and Media. The article has raised [...]

… “just because an institution or a practice is rooted in tradition does not make it right.”
This statement appears in the position paper of MarriagEquality, the campaign to extend civil marriage to same sex couples. It is a statement with which I wholeheartedly concur; tradition and practice are not an infallible or a desirable means [...]

That ol’ red herring - Labour’s links with trade unions - is raising its head again. Kevin Rafter suggests the Party’s 21st Century Commission (an internal review body) should:
‘ . . . look at Labour’s relationship with the trade union movement.’
Mr. Rafter likens this relationship to that which the State used to have with religious [...]

 
In the third of our interviews on the media I talked to Dr. Heinz Brandenburg of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, about political bias in the Irish media, how parties manage the media or fail to, and how the media covers politics in general.
Background
Dr. Heinz Brandenburg has written [...]

I’ve been promising/threatening to provide a review of David Graeber’s new book, Possibilities, for a few weeks, but a number of factors intervened to postpone it. First, a bunch of books arrived on my doorstep that demanded attention, not least because they touched on some of the issues dealt with in the Graeber book.
Second, [...]

The latest travesty from the Zapatero circus which we laughingly call the government is the news that the pregnant minister for defence, who is a woman (but not a lady), has imposed strict censorship on staff which prevent them from surfing the Internet while they are at work in order to look for the football [...]

Shane Coleman doesn’t believe. CORI recently published its exhaustive Socio-Economic Review 2008 - a 240 page report detailing all aspects of poverty in Ireland. Contained therein was the startling fact that there are over 720,000 poor people living amongst us. Not only that, there are now more poor people today than there were at [...]

Last week, Cork man Trevor Casey was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for the rape and sexual assault of two teenage girls. During sentencing, the judge referred to a letter from Labour Deputy Kathleen Lynch indicating that Mr. Casey was from “a good family”. On Sunday, Deputy Lynch issued a statement accepting [...]

ISME’s recent Business Trends Survey makes for grim reading. Employment is down. Sales, investment, orders, and exports are all down. And owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are extremely nervous, as well they should be. A hard rain is starting to fall. Of course, ISME knows who to blame: the [...]

Once again, the socialist prime minister of Spain, the moron Zapatero, has made a laughing stock of our country by including seven middle-aged women in his cabinet, making it the first mostly female cabinet in Spanish history. El Generalisimo must be spinning in his grave like a strombola. Is this what we fought the Civil [...]