“for Mr Ó Nualláin, ‘might have been’ has loomed largely in his college life - larger than his bantam strutting will admit”
“When Mr Fitzpatrick grows up, he will find that ‘might-have-been’ figures too largely in his own little life, as in everybody else’s, to be safely employed as a weapon against others.”
I’ve recently read No [...]

Irish housing statistics are notoriously vague. There is no accounting system for new housing units - rather, the CSO has to rely on figures from the ESB with regard to new connections, and from that it extrapolates the amount of new units.
The CSO’s figures for the amount of mortgages sold is also somewhat oblique, as [...]

What follows deals almost entirely with internal divisions within Cork republicanism and is not meant as a comprehensive outline of republican and left-wing activities in the city during the period covered. Moreover, these notes were put together following specific queries from historical researchers and, hence, the focus at times is on matters that they raised.’ [...]

In The Limits of Liberty, historian Diarmuid Ferriter has been given three one hour episodes to lay out the social history of the Irish Republic.  It is, of course, too brief, but the first episode is encouraging for its dissection of the new-state’s failure to deliver on promises of equality.
The first episode is shot through [...]

In the June budget the Minister for Finance, Mr. Richie Ryan, announced that the two major Associated Banks [Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank] had agreed to make £40 million available to house purchasers over the next two years. The two major banks were each to make £10 million available for house purchase loans [...]

As with the first article in this series, forgotten faces is more of a discussion piece than a finished analysis. It’s only in the later issues of The Ripening of Time, especially nos. 11 and 13 which date from 1979 and 1980 respectively, that we get a full and detailed Marxist analysis of Ireland in [...]

Last month Tom Redmond of the CPI gave me a large collection of newspapers and pamphlets relating to the Irish left, including all fourteen issues of The Ripening of Time (1976-1982), an Irish Marxist journal produced by the Ripening of Time collective.
Throughout its six-year run, The Ripening of Time provided introductions to Marxist theory, as [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]