Book Review: What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici (Yale University Press 2010)
When a dreadful book like Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question can win a major literary award against a novel like Tom McCarthy’s C, this is a question well worth posing and not just in relation to 2010’s Booker prize winner. Think of some [...]

Thursday NEXT is protest day!
THE FINANCE BILL
The debate on the Finance Bill which on becoming law, will implement the provisions of the ‘Brussels Budget’; the most horrendous in the history of this state, will commence on Thursday next in Dail Eireann. This will be the legacy of the Fianna Fail/ Green coalition and of the [...]

You should be at home making profiteroles, not making penis jokes on a podium.
Me: I have a question for you. What have got in common Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul Mark 2?
You: Is it that they all are dead?
Me: Don’t be a moronic. Everyone all knows [...]

Brian Lenihan and Patrick Honohan inform us that the EU/IMF deal is not written in stone, that it can be ‘renegotiated’ (even, it seems, the interest rate). For progressives, the issue of renegotiation is paramount for, as it stands, the bail-out would force us into (a) squandering our assets and [...]

The Bloom Movement* and the Feminist Open Forum**
Invite you to a Lunchtime discussion with renowned author and activist
Susan George
‘Global Crises Coming Home: Whose Crisis, Whose Future?’
The discussion will focus on exploring the current multi-faceted global crises - social, economic, financial, ecological - including the impacts of debt and the IMF, which have [...]

We are hurtling towards the economic relegation zone - and few are noticing.
Over on Progressive-Economy, Anonymous left a comment on a post I did regarding exports:
‘If what you are saying is that a big part of our economy is detached from the main economy, and that our GDP and even GNP figures are [...]

Frozen assets
There is an ache across the land
frozen in fields and garden pathways,
in city streets and promenades, in back ways
where only the underground people
trade as they try to melt the ice
that freezes hearts in city mansions.
When the country defrosts it will be
a different place - the underground people
disappeared deeper under stones,
into the fissures of a [...]

IPRT welcomes commitment to penal reform and imprisonment as a last resort but calls for clearer statement on Thornton Hall
The Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) welcomes the clear commitment to penal reform and imprisonment as a last resort included in the Labour Penal Reform Policy Document, which was launched today. IPRT believes this policy statement [...]

It’s bad enough the debate has not asked the fundamental question of why, after a series of austerity budgets, the deficit did not fall, borrowing costs shot through the roof and growth rates were slashed. It’s as if none of this happened and the only way we can climb out of the fiscal crisis is [...]

It is just over a month since the ULA was launched and the paucity of organised resistance to the deepening economic crisis has made the alternative offered by the ULA all the more urgent. So the formation of the ULA is very welcome. Also welcome is the public commitment to the ULA by PBP, the [...]