If Darren Scully, the Fine Gael mayor of Naas, was feeling ‘sad’ yesterday, there is every chance his melancholy has taken a turn for the worse as today has progressed. Yesterday Cllr Scully was ‘sad’ preemptively, in case anyone would think him racist for refusing to deal with ‘Black Africans’ because of their ‘aggressive attitude‘. [...]

Pamela Izevbekhai and her daughters, Naomi (10) and Jemima (9) were deported from Ireland on Tuesday morning. Having been arrested at 1.30am, they were flown to Amsterdam at 6am, to be placed on a flight to the Nigerian capital Lagos later that day. Following the failure, last month, of her case in the European Court [...]

(This article was first published in Crisisjam on politico.ie on 21/1/11. This is an updated version 24/1/11)
Is there anything left to say about the spectacle of the last week? How do you sketch out that place beyond absurdity, the ‘are’ in ‘we are where we are’? Unluckily, others have been here before.
In The Emperor, Ryszard [...]

The title of this wee piece scans a little like a football chant. That might, at least at the start, make it easier reading for Ian O’Doherty of The Irish Independent. But it’s mainly a direct reply to his article today on asylum-seekers in Mosney, “It’s not racist to say sorry we’re full“.
There is a [...]

Originally published on MediaBite.
For as long as I can remember, coverage of the teachers’ conferences has provided journalists with a license for a spot of amateur anthropology, a chance to walk amongst this strange tribe as they let off steam before their annual 13 months of holiday. Last week’s coverage, however, was extraordinary: while [...]

Yesterday’s editorials of The Irish Times and The Irish Examiner are politically instructive, that is to say, they illustrate a situation in which politics cannot take place. The differences in tone tell us much about their minimal market/political differentiation. The crowing populism of the Examiner still imagines that it hears the Fine Gael Ard Fheis [...]