This article is based on a contribution to a seminar held at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities last Friday called The Rise of the Indignant: Spain, Greece, Europe. Audio from the event is available here.
Politics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are striking back. Portugal, Ireland [...]

I have been playing Fine Gael’s videogame entitled ‘Go Ireland - The Videogame‘, and I think that we can glean an awful lot about the party from it. Let me, really briefly, explain some of the crucial points and insightful analysis that I think they mean to convey through this new political medium:

We (the putative [...]

The images of the Gardai’s horse charge or their over-zealous use of the baton (knocking a young woman out cold and bloodying the faces of others), being used on peaceful student demonstrations has a chilling effect. We are unaccustomed to seeing our Gardai in the same light as (the very often violent) Italian or French [...]

The question of populism and radical change has re-emerged in American politics, first with Obama and now with the tea party movement. However, it was another story that recently caught my eye. The New York Times carried a story about Republican ‘agents’ (or ‘operatives’) encouraging homeless people to stand unopposed in the Green Party primaries. [...]

In his insightful ‘Inaugural Editorial’ for the Irish Human Rights Law Review, Donncha O’Connell briefly addresses the lack of enthusiasm in Ireland for a political approach to human rights (rather than juridical).  There is much to commend the editorial. Perhaps the most interesting element is O’Connell’s sense of the political and its relation to human [...]

Ireland is in the middle of a catastrophized recession. This will come as no surprise to anyone in Ireland, though perhaps it is not known as well internationally as one might think. One of the crucial features of the time leading up to the boom was the activity of the property developers, the ‘risk-taking’ darlings [...]