What do you call this? Eamon Gilmore, TD read out in the Dail a statement by Brian Cowen, TD from 2004 when the latter was Minister for Finance. Mr. Cowen was explaining why Ireland was finding it difficult to reach the Overseas Aid Development target of 0.7% of GNP.
‘The problem here is we [...]

Friday morning and I’m looking forward to the weekend and hopefully catching a few rays.  A friend, however, sends me a copy of the Goodbody report - the most pessimistic forecast yet.  It’s already raining.Goodbody predicts the economy will decline by 2.2 per cent this year but the good news is that next year, [...]

ICTU is playing some hardball. Recently, David Begg suggested that inflation could go as high as 6.5 per cent. He’s probably not far off the mark. Today’s CSO’s figures show inflation running at 5 per cent - up a half a per cent since last month Even the European HICP [...]

Eat This, Mister Federal!
Did you watch all of the Wimberdon final on Sunday? No, neither did I, but wasn’t it absolutely riveting?! I could not take my eyes off all the backhanders, forehanders, serveces, volleys, drop shots and blobs. Was really great entertaining.
And in the end of course we had the best winner, as you [...]

Lunchtime
No matter what point in the economic cycle a country is in, the science of history gets a battering. But in recession times, history is just simply invented.
Take Professor Mary Harney, TD, on Question & Answers the other night. She treated us to a yellow-note lecture on . . well . [...]

Lunchtime:
Thank god someone is talking common sense. Tom O’Connor, economist at the Cork Institute of Technology, was on Morning Ireland arguing that rather than cutting expenditure, we should be looking to increase taxation on the wealthier sections of society His premise is that our tax take is low and what we need [...]

Karl Marx, 64. Communist.
–When I was suffering from haemorrhoids, I had more than a dozen doctors look up my arse to effect a cure. Not a one of them could manage it. Do you know what cured me in the end? Homeopathy. Homeopathy and the Dialectic.
–Having children alters your perspective on life utterly. You lose [...]

In the current economic climate it’s hard to know what is more depressing: the fact of economic recession, the onslaught of the Right through all the channels at their disposal, the unsettling quiescence of the Left, or the besieging of the trade union movement. It’s all coming down the pipe so fast [...]

A couple of weeks back on Irish Left Review I wrote a piece on good and bad left-wing cinema, noting how many films whose political views one might share tend to be atrocious and embarrassing to watch. There are, however, some good ones and many in recent times have been coming out of Israel, ironically [...]

Si, is the former Atlético Madrid moron and now Scouse bastard Fernando Torres, who score the winning goal for Spain last weekend in the esciting final of the Eurovision Football Championships against the rubbish Germans to secure for Spain their first proper international football trophy since the days of el Generalísimo himself. Was a wonderful, [...]