ISME’s recent Business Trends Survey makes for grim reading. Employment is down. Sales, investment, orders, and exports are all down. And owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are extremely nervous, as well they should be. A hard rain is starting to fall. Of course, ISME knows who to blame: the [...]

In the second of our interviews with independent commentators on the Irish media, I asked Simon McGarr and Fergal Crehan of the Tuppenceworth blog and fellow blogger Copernicus of Midnight Court about their Paper Round project. The exercise was to dedicate a weekend to reading Ireland’s newspapers in order to sift their contents and see [...]

As part of a series of interviews on the Irish media by independent commentators, I asked Chekov Feeney, who writes on the Irish media for Village magazine, about the newly formed Press Council, the forthcoming changes to the Defamation Act, 1961, and whether this would have any impact on how the Irish media behaves.
The setting [...]

The new union UNITE (the merged ATGWU and AMICUS unions) has just published a report on Irish wages that is sure to prove controversial. It flatly contradicts the prevailing consensus that Irish wages are somehow ‘high’, that Irish wage growth is high relative to our EU trading partners, and that these ‘high’ wages are [...]

Paul Tansey wrote an impressive list of economic achievements during Bertie Ahern’s tenure as Taoiseach:
On Ahern’s watch, the Irish economy almost doubled in size, while the numbers at work increased by one-half . . The unemployment rate declined from 10.4 per cent in 1997 to 4.6. In the 10 years from 1987 to [...]

There’s a famous story about the technical problems encountered by Soviet director Aleksandr Dovzhenko while shooting his 1930 film Earth, an admiring account of the effect of collectivization on the Russian peasantry. Working with non-professional actors, he was shooting a scene one day that showed the arrival of a tractor on a farm on the [...]

Breaking News - Press Association (1 Hour ago) Gilmore claims victory in Irish local elections. The Leader of the Irish Labour Party claimed victory in Ireland’s local election.  Speaking at a press conference with the leaders of Sinn Fein and the Green Party, he called yesterday’s result a ‘breakthrough not only for the [...]

A quick word on the Oscars, if only because ignoring them in the week of this site’s inauguration would be just a little too perverse. I didn’t deign to actually watch the ceremony - the last time I bothered staying up that late the winner was Titanic and, as I’m sure you can guess, the [...]

It is a sad fact of reality that women, despite making up 51% of the population, only hold less than 13% of seats in the Dáil, leaving Ireland ranking 59th out of 120 nations examined for parliamentary representation of women in 2006. Apologists for this pitiful situation will of course either a) blame the [...]

Every so often last year I would take the Metro line 9 out to its terminus in Montreuil – a suburb just east of the confines of Paris – to teach, at the town hall, one of the mayoral staff, a rather reluctant student, who needed to brush up on his English for the many [...]