Where is My Fire Engine, Thieving Gypsy Lady?!
I am can only give you a roundup of the impressive fascism-on-the-march news this week, since it have all been so busy, but you should all be inspire and motivate by seeing some of the most important people in Europe FINALLY doing some moves to promote the escape [...]

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone are writing in the New York Times‘ Econmix blog about Ireland again.
Johnson is, of course, a former Chief Economist of the IMF, an institution that has largely endorsed Ireland’s austerity measures and suggests more may be needed.
However, Johnson and Boone’s comments are that current government policy isn’t working, and this [...]

Irish society remains deeply unequal despite massive wealth creation during the Celtic tiger years.   It is estimated that a mere 5% of the population hold 40% of the wealth in Ireland.
Discrimination as experienced by women, Black and minority ethnic people  including Travellers, older people, young people, lesbian, gay and transgendered people, lone parents, carers, people [...]

The older one gets the more one tends to grumble and groan loudly to oneself, or so my elders tell me. You groan when you bend over because your back isn’t what it used to be; you grumble at the television because there is rarely anything on worth watching and you don’t agree with anyone [...]

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 [...]