“We have no interest in oppressing other people. We are not moved by hatred against any other nation. The … maintenance of a tremendous military arsenal can only be regarded as a focus of danger. We have displayed a truly unexampled patience, but I am no longer willing to remain inactive while this madman ill-treats [...]

Eoin Ó Broin’s Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (Pluto Books) looked like a timely book when it came out a few weeks ago.  Events since have only emphasised the relevance of its argument.
The book opens with a trenchant defence of Sinn Féin against allegations that is an authoritarian, quasi-fascist movement. Ó Broin acknowledges [...]

SPOILER ALERT: The following article contains spoilers galore, so it’s best not to read it unless you’ve followed The Wire to the very end.
There have been few television shows that have enjoyed a posthumous fame as great as The Wire. Generally ignored by the public and the Emmys ever since its debut in early 2002, [...]

“The challenge for those who believe art should have real purchase on contemporary debate is always how to write the engaged political poem while still making it artful.”
Siobhán Campbell, MA/MFA Course Leader, Creative Writing, at Kingston University, London.
“Why bother with political poetry, just send me a text,”
A comment made by a radio host recently as [...]

George Orwell once said something along the lines of just because the news about the Gulags appeared in the Daily Telegraph, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. The blurb on the front of Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship describes it as “A truly magnificent book.” That quote comes from the Sunday Telegraph.  Conceivably, then, the Telegraph stable [...]

“An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”
Nancy Mitford

Amidst the collapse of the Irish economy, the inhabitants of a rural hinterland begin to feel the touch of the dead hand of the housing market.
This [...]

Another year at the movies and another good one. Too often we hear jeremiads about the decline of cinema and the lack of good films out there (of course, such gripes are usually based on a diet of English-language cinema, which is far from being the world’s most interesting at the best of times). But [...]

A system in crisis
There were two remarkable things about the Lisbon Treaty referendum that have been almost completely ignored by the men and women whose job it is to chew over Irish politics on a daily basis. First of all, the result showed that Irish citizens have no confidence in the people they vote for. [...]

One of the secret weapons of the occupation forces in Iraq has been the sheer danger of reporting on the conflict. The occupiers themselves have attacked the local offices of Al-Jazeera, the broadcaster with the least inclination to “embed” itself in the protective grasp of the US army: their claim that this was an unfortunate [...]

As a teenager watching Clive James on the TV of a Sunday night, I was never quite sure what to make of his combination of sparkling wit and sneering sarcasm. He was undeniably funny and reassuring yet at the same time somehow unable to disguise his discomfort at fronting a show composed of short, superficial [...]