Government lies and myths cloud attacks on social welfare
Tune into Pat Kenny, Live at 5, or any other formulaic RTÉ current affairs programme these days and chances are you’ll come across a panel of ‘experts’ debating the social welfare dilemma. It’s no coincidence that, two years into a recession, with unemployment and a deficit still [...]

With industrial action in the public sector ramping up a couple of notches, it is worth revisiting a couple of issues in relation to pay. A critical issue is the fiscal benefit or otherwise that accrues to the Exchequer from cutting public sector wages - I will examine this in the next post. Here, let’s [...]

There is probably no one who really believes that NAMA will succeed in its core mission - freeing up credit for the economy. I doubt that even the Minister’s scriptwriters really believe it. Is there anyone out there who believes it? I thought so.
Whatever about the long-term fortunes of the banking sector there is no [...]

The economist Michael Burke has a post up on Socialist Economic Bulletin, which has been cross-posted on Progressive Economy about the current situation in Greece. The post is a follow on from his previous posts on the topic which I have already linked to. In this piece Michael shows that Greece’s debt crisis has been [...]

175 Boston Scientific jobs to go in Galway, the loss of 200 Bitech Engineering jobs in Louth,a seismic 750 job lost at Halifax, those depressing numbers that Ronan Lyons has pulled up - what are we to make of the state of the labour market only a few weeks into the new year?
Hard to get [...]

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
SOCIOLOGY LECTURE SERIES 2010
Prof James Wickham
Head of School of Social Sciences and Philosophy

Financial markets and social power - the new inequalities of turbo-capitalism

Wednesday 10 February 2010
7.00- 9.30 pm
Synge lecture theatre, Arts Building, TCD

A L L   W E L C O M E

The Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, in a ‘State of the Nation’ type TV appearance yesterday, Tuesday Feb. 2nd, announced three drastic new austerity measures that seem to have taken aback most  political commentators. These three measures had been dismissed as “unworkable” by the PM himself as late as last weekend and were certainly not [...]

In the concluding chapter of his new book New Old World, Perry Anderson asks the question: what exactly is the EU for? What benefits are supposed to be result of this project of increasing political and economic integration?
Citing past notions, he refers to the initial ‘heroic phase of European integration’ that assured peace for Europe [...]

Comparisons between Ireland and Iceland abound, but as recent events there show, the public response has been more vociferous to the injustice of the Icesave bailout. However, as political activist, poet, editor and member of the Icelandic parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir shows here, Iceland is also like Ireland in that it is a small Island with [...]

In the midst of one of history’s most severe crises of capitalism, there is no more apt time than the present to briefly survey the basics of Marxist economics. It would be beyond the scope of this short article to trace the development of the theory from the works of Marx up until the present [...]