On Wednesday 21 December 2011 Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan announced that NAMA were to make 2,000 properties available to the Government for social housing.
The units, which were said to make up 20% of NAMAs residential property portfolio would be managed by local authorities and housing associations and funded via the Social Housing Leasing [...]

Stephen Collins bothers me. Every time I read his Irish Times column I get an uncomfortable feeling. Something just doesn’t seem right.
At first I thought it was because my views were diametrically opposed to his. Maybe it was the ideological gulf between us that bothered me.
But then I realised that I read a great many [...]

2011 has been a very interesting year for the southern Irish party political left.
The general election in February brought the largest number of left wing deputies into the Oireachtas in its 90-year history. Sixty-three TDs were elected on a variety of social democratic, left republican, revolutionary socialist and independent left platforms.
The combined left vote broke [...]

Women make up almost 50% of the population. Yet astonishingly, only 15.1% of TDs in the Dáil are women.
The 2011 general election was one of the most dramatic in recent history, with a record 84 seats changing hands. Despite this fact the number of women elected only increased marginally on the 2007 general election. In 2007 [...]

Housing policy is one of the issues that goes to the heart of our current economic crisis. More than health or education it is an area of policy that successive governments left to the mercy of the market.
Some of the consequences are widely acknowledged, such as the massive property bubble and subsequent house price crash.
Unfortunately [...]

Fintan O’Toole is an intelligent and thought provoking commentator.
His new book, Enough Is Enough, offers 50 proposals for political and social reform. Many offer sensible and credible solutions to the failures of our current system and are remarkably similar to Sinn Fein’s current policy agenda. Others, while not to the tastes of this writer, are [...]

Public anger is growing.  Three austerity budgets and the banking guarantee have deepened rather than resolved the economic crisis. And now, in defiance of all the evidence the Government are going to continue with these failed policies with more vigor and determination that ever before.
The four-year plan and Budget 2011 will push thousands of families [...]

If yesterday’s Paddy Power opinion poll is anything to go by, the result of next weeks Donegal South West by-election could herald a greater degree of electoral and political change than previously anticipated.
500 voters from across the constituency were asked to state their preferences for the by-election, for a future general election and for [...]

As we collectively brace ourselves for four years of austerity, it is worth remembering that Ireland is not a poor country.
Yes we have high levels of unemployment and poverty. Yes we have high levels of private and public debt.  But the money that flowed into the country at the height of the boom has not [...]

Something interesting happened in Dublin on Saturday October 30th 2010. It is not yet clear whether what happened was important. But it was interesting nonetheless.
More than one thousand people from all over Ireland gathered in the Industries Hall at the RDS to participate in an event called Claiming Our Future.
There were community and voluntary sector [...]