It’s an old cliche that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity. In Haiti however, business and political leaders are not concerned with originality. The catastrophic earthquake was quick to be seen as an opportunity to rebuild the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, with the US thinktank the Heritage Foundation famously writing that [...]

In The Limits of Liberty, historian Diarmuid Ferriter has been given three one hour episodes to lay out the social history of the Irish Republic.  It is, of course, too brief, but the first episode is encouraging for its dissection of the new-state’s failure to deliver on promises of equality.
The first episode is shot through [...]

In the aftermath of an earthquake that devastated the slum-cities of Haiti, there has been a strong influx of foreign money and troops, apparently to help rebuild the poverty-stricken country. However, we should note that many of the countries that have been to the fore in expressing their altruistic intentions are those which are most [...]

Sometimes a team needs a leader, to take a game into their hands and turn it around. For France, Henry was that man. A disorganised and unmotivated French side were harried and fraught by an under-valued Irish team, but extra time put the win up for grabs – and it was the French who reached [...]

Director Neil Blomkamp constructs a sci-fi allegory to explore the violence, cruelty and exploitation of South African segregation and poverty, apartheid and after. The result, however, is an awkward
collage of documentary, body-horror, corporate exposé, and action movie.
In 1989, intergalactic refugees arrive at Johannesburg, South Africa, and, much like their earthly counterparts, they are confined to [...]

Somewhere in the late thirties or early forties, the esteemed Myles na gCopaleen, of Cruiskeen Lawn estate, took it upon himself to pen the deepest and truest articulation of the then-popular Gaeltacht biography, otherwise best known in the work of Tomas O’ Criomthain and Peig Sayers. And so, An Béal Bocht became the greatest expression [...]