Book Review: Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling, Policy Press (2010)
Over the last two decades or so, scholars concerned with social justice have offered a number of different frameworks for helping us to analyse the problem. These have included the extensively discussed two-dimensional approach that classifies issues under the headings of redistribution [...]

Book Review:The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.
It isn’t entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material [...]

Book review: ‘Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century’ by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)
This inspiring book examines how women challenged many aspects of public and private life between the 1880s and 1920s, in Britain and in the USA. They did so from different positions in the political spectrum, as liberals, socialists [...]

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

Book Review: Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, Natasha Walter (Virago 2010)

When the facts changed, Natasha Walter changed her mind. Or so she says in Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, a book that describes how raunch culture has co-opted the language of choice and liberation and how the post-feminist cultural politics of celebrating doll-like [...]

Book Review: Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia before and after Suharto, Verso, 2008
There was a time when everyone seemed to be talking about Indonesia. Well, they were talking about it on Joe Duffy and Pat Kenny at least, and that’s as near as makes no difference in this country. As East Timor voted to extricate [...]

Some facts about the recession - Drafted by Eddie Conlon, TUI and originally posted on Paddy Healy’s blog.
The Public Sector
Far from what the government would have us believe the Irish Public Sector is not bloated. The 2008 OECD Review of public services showed that spending on public services in Ireland in 2005 was third lowest [...]

Ostensibly an official history, John Cunningham’s study of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), and its relationship with the education system, also touches on four key elements of Irish society over the past 100 years: religion, class, politics and economics. It looks at the changes in Ireland since the foundation of the association [...]