There is big money in oil.  Certainly that seems to be the motivation for people like Sean Fitzpatrick who along with Lar Bradshaw invested €25million in Movido Exploration and Production, an oil company operating in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
There is also big trouble associated with oil and the people of the Niger Delta [...]

There is a new Think Piece on the TASC website co-authored by one of our regular contributors, Justin Frewen.
Called The Socio-Economic Realities of Mental Health, by Justin and co-author Dr. Anna Datta, the paper can be downloaded from the TASC site here.
“An ever-growing body of research indicates that the failure to adequately tackle mental health [...]

The title of this wee piece scans a little like a football chant. That might, at least at the start, make it easier reading for Ian O’Doherty of The Irish Independent. But it’s mainly a direct reply to his article today on asylum-seekers in Mosney, “It’s not racist to say sorry we’re full“.
There is a [...]

Ireland is changing and along with it the many ways oppression including racism manifests in society.  The past few years has seen a marked denial of the very existence of racism with the language of diversity and integration dominating the policy and public discourse.
The only formal structure with an exclusive focus on racism, the National [...]

In the first part of this two part mini-series on domestic abuse in Ireland I looked at the reality of domestic abuse and the scale of the problem in Ireland. In this final part, I will look at what might be done to help support the victims of such abuse.
Domestic Abuse in Ireland
One in three [...]

The Irish Penal Reform Trust, Ireland’s leading voice for penal reform, will today host an Open Public Forum, entitled Exploding Prisoner Numbers – Causes, Effects and Solutions. The event, which is chaired by the Inspector Prisons, Judge Michael Reilly, will outline the causes of rocketing prison numbers in Ireland, and identify practical solutions to the [...]

On the 17th of June last Professor Kathleen Lynch, Professor of Equality Studies at the School of Social Justice at UCD, gave the 2010 TASC Annual Lecture at the Royal Irish Academy. It was called From a Neo-Liberal to an Egalitarian State: Imagining a different Future and it provides not only an excellent analysis of [...]

Abuse of Women in Conflict Zones
It is only in the last couple of decades that the world has focused on the horrific levels of violence perpetrated against women in times of war. Although women and girls have been the victims of sexual violence and other forms of aggression dating back several millennia, their plight has [...]

The world is suffering from an increasing burden of mental disorders, which has been further aggravated by a widening “treatment gap”. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that mental health ranks second amongst global illnesses. Furthermore, recent WHO analyses calculate that neuropsychiatric conditions impacted upon some 10% for adults or approximately 450 million people.
Irish-based studies [...]

Imagine what would happen if Irish politicians from across Dáil Éireann - from Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, The Green Party, Labour, and Sinn Fein - came together to demand a policy change that they all agreed on, and, what is more, if they were willing to make a very visible public demonstration of their agreement [...]