Sins of the Father is now available in Easons, O’Connell St, Dublin and Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street, and hopefully throughout the country soon. This is the first review of the book to appear in print. Originally published in the June edition of Liberty, SIPTU’s newspaper. Thanks to Scott Millar for allowing me to republish [...]

Book review: Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin
Not since Monica Lewinsky has the intern received as much attention as in recent months. Since the practise of auctioning off prestigious internships to the highest bidders at the Conservative Ball became public knowledge and David Cameron [...]

Just to let ILR (RSS and email sub) readers know Conor McCabe’s book Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy is available from the publisher The History Press, Ireland and various online book retail outfits. It’s due in bookshops this weekend. We’ll keep you posted on the launch.
From [...]

Book Review: Riotous Assemblies: Rebels, Riots and Revolts in Ireland, Edited by William Sheehan & Maura Cronin, Mercier 2011
Riots get a bad press.
After the rubble is removed, rioters tend not to have a press office established to spin their take on events. But it’s not principally this lack of media savvy that means their narrative [...]

Anyone trying to make sense of Ireland’s crisis, and looking for an alternative to the right-wing consensus shared by the three major parties and virtually the entire print media, is most likely to find their starting-point in the writings of Fintan O’Toole. O’Toole’s columns in the Irish Times, his regular appearance on radio and TV, [...]

Book Review: Springtime, the New Student Rebellions (Edited by Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri. Verso, March 2011.)
The autumn and winter of 2010 saw the sudden and dramatic re-emergence of radical student movements, with mass student uprisings taking place across Europe and the United States in opposition to both the austerity measures being levelled against [...]

Book Review: Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge & London: MIT Press. 2003
Žižek & Milbank,  The Monstrosity of Christ. Cambridge & London : MIT Press. 2009
Leibnitz famously posed the fundamental ontological question when he said we have a right to ask why there is something rather than nothing [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Book Review: Damming the Flood - Haiti and the Politics of Containment, Peter Hallward (Verso, 2nd Edition, Jan 2011).
Haiti is a country largely ignored by the world’s media and public opinion. It needs a catastrophe, whether a hurricane, cholera outbreak or an earthquake, to bring it to the world’s attention. Thus, an image has been [...]