This is an extract from a just published paper prepared for Action from Ireland (Afri), December 2010. Click the link to access the full paper (PDF): The IMF and Ireland: What We Can Learn From The Global South.
The Politics of Denying Democratic Choice
Ireland has been a member of the IMF since 1957.[1] Despite [...]

It is now possible to begin to draw a tentative balance sheet of the vast movement against the reform (or more exactly, counter-reform) of the pension system that we have seen in France over the last few months. We need to look at the depth and breadth of the movement, the forms that [...]

And the big difference in twenty years? Money. Lots of it now. Back then, not enough.’ (Aine Lawlor, May 2006)
On 31 May 2006 RTE broadcast a ninety-minute documentary entitled That Was Then, This is Now. It consisted of nine personal reflections on Ireland and the changes the country underwent from 1986 to 2006. The contributors [...]

An interview with filmmaker Eamonn Crudden
This interview is was originally published on media bite. You can watch the three parts of the Wallets Full of Blood trilogy here: Houses on the Moon , Zombie Banker Blues ,  Roscommon Death Trip
A compelling narrative of Ireland’s crisis of capitalism is very difficult to find. Those provided by [...]

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 in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]

Gaza via London
Oh child of chance,
Oh blasted child,
Fair as ever anything,
Universe of wasted grace.
Kneeling now and always now
In your ruined house
Hearing troops of a general doom
Whistling with purpose
While priming their mortars for you.

The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps: Eric Hazan | Verso (2010) pp400 (£20)
There are few cities in the world as indelibly branded, in both a commercial and a figurative sense, in the minds of people as Paris. This is all thanks to a handful of iconic monuments made famous from millions upon millions [...]

Radical Irish Lives: Peadar O’Donnell by Donal Ó’Drisceoil - Cork University Press
The recent reportage of the teachers’ unions conferences would have delighted Peadar O’Donnell, who began his career as an activist in the INTO. The general tenor of the media response was ‘how dare these people object to having their pay slashed and conditions of [...]

The recent tragic killing of Toyosi Shittabey behooves us all to critically reflect upon, and engage in national dialogue about, the true scale and nature of racism in Irish society today. The pervasiveness of racism in Irish society is a reality that a number of young people in the Tyrellstown area—where Toyosi was killed—have eloquently [...]