I am proud to be among the many Irish and Ireland-based artists from across creative disciplines who have chosen to publicly support the growing campaign of boycott against apartheid Israel. Compared to the imprisoned Palestinian people themselves and to those taking part in flotillas and other perilous anti-apartheid activities in Palestine our contribution and risk [...]

Wall supports Brand Ireland
Following on recent calls by An Taoiseach Brian Cowen and journalist Enda O’Doherty for Irish writers to ‘do the state some service’ (and leaving aside the fact that the first man to use the expression [see footnote] committed suicide immediately afterwards), I want to say: Good Taoiseach (as Joe Higgins used to [...]

One can only chuckle. Last year the pronouncements of rating agencies were treated as though they were written on Mount Sinai. Downgrades, or the threat of such, were interpreted by our high priests of deflation as demands to cut public spending. That’s what we did - big time; slashing public spending by nearly €9 billion [...]

“for Mr Ó Nualláin, ‘might have been’ has loomed largely in his college life - larger than his bantam strutting will admit”
“When Mr Fitzpatrick grows up, he will find that ‘might-have-been’ figures too largely in his own little life, as in everybody else’s, to be safely employed as a weapon against others.”
I’ve recently read No [...]

José Saramago 1922 - 2010
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) - [...]

Meet the Spartniks!
As regular readers of my blog are already know, my father was in the Spanish air force back in the time when it was the poor relation of the arm services. The navy and army and Spanish Foreign Legion was get most of the glory during the Spanish Civil War for Golf, and [...]

There have been some outrageous and hilarious things said in this economic debate. I don’t know how economic historians will come to rank them. But surely at the top must be the claim that the rich have paid a ‘far higher price’ than other groups in society as a result of the economic downturn. You [...]

A small follow on from Michael Taft’s post, about the well-known exports tax scam known as the “Double-Irish”.
The story of the tax scam has gone around the world and some at this stage, but I’ve yet to see or hear of it on Irish TV or radio, or in the print media.
Following on from my [...]