What a thing for a country to do to people - to take away who they are.” (Peter Sheridan, playwright, 2005)
In 2004 the author and academic Helena Sheehan wrote that for the first five years of RTE’s flagship soap opera, Glenroe, nobody worked for a wage. She also noted that in its other soap, Fair [...]

CONVERSATION BETWEEN A GARDA SERGEANT AND THE EVER-RUNNING CAMERA
Come down down outta that tree
come down outta that tree
ya gobshite
ya banshee
or we”ll bomb ya
Get off the road
ya hippy scum
Get off the fucking road
the road is for tractors
and tanks
and hummers
or anything with oil in it
but you’ve no fucking oil in ya have ya?
so get off the road
GET [...]

Book Review: Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now - Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything, by David Sirota (New York, Ballantine Books $25)

We had a unusually cold spell in the west of Ireland in January 1984 with snow remaining on the ground for a week or [...]

Play Poland - Irish-Polish Film Project is a unique festival platform for Irish-Polish filmmakers,
students and cinema lovers that will take place in Dublin in July 2011. It is a part of the biggest
Polish film festival in Europe, being run between May and September 2011.
This festival offers a creative mix of films, workshops and cinema posters. [...]

Creature of habit that I am, this month means a getaway to somewhere hot and sunny. The heat is for my better half’s arthritis, the sun is for my ageing flesh. It also means an opportunity for some light reading that can’t be done on the train for fear of ostracism. I can still remember [...]

To mark the centenary of the first International Women’s Day, the Communist Party of Ireland launched a booklet entitled “The Equality Delusion” to help develop the debate that is needed on equality and to challenge the notion that the equality agenda is something distinct and separate from class politics in Ireland today.
The deepening economic [...]

Elegy for Bettino Craxi (1934-2000)
- Bettino Craxi was leader of the Italian Socialist Party
and Prime Minister. He went into exile in 1994 and died in Tunisia.
Poor Bettino Craxi, you’ve been taken to your grave
and we won’t see your likes again.
Your social democratic bones were barely cold
when your obituaries began to bitch.
All week long it’s [...]

Democracy
The day after they won the election
I cleaned out my Nationwide account,
Filled my satchel at an unfinished estate
With palm-sized and weighted rocks
And went looking for the chanting crowds.
Kevin O’Shea, February 2011

Book Review: Sarah Clancy: Stacey and the Mechanical Bull. Lapwing Press, Belfast 2010.
Sarah Clancy is interviewed by Dave Lordan below
It’s rare enough to go come across a volume of poetry that wouldn’t render you catatonic with boredom, but Sarah Clancy’s isn’t one of those. It pokes you in the eye repeatedly and kicks you in [...]

An Interview with Ashis Nandy.
Prof Ashis Nandy is a well known social thinker and social psychologist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. He has been an outspoken critic of science, modernity and secularism. His writings since the early 1980s have been extremely influential, in conjunction with Edward Said’s critique [...]