The older one gets the more one tends to grumble and groan loudly to oneself, or so my elders tell me. You groan when you bend over because your back isn’t what it used to be; you grumble at the television because there is rarely anything on worth watching and you don’t agree with anyone [...]

The title of this wee piece scans a little like a football chant. That might, at least at the start, make it easier reading for Ian O’Doherty of The Irish Independent. But it’s mainly a direct reply to his article today on asylum-seekers in Mosney, “It’s not racist to say sorry we’re full“.
There is a [...]

Reporting Palestine and the Mavi Marmara
One of the most interesting features of mainstream reporting on Israel and Palestine is the disparity between the way violent attacks by each side are presented. Israel’s actions are chiefly explained in terms of its right to “self defence“, while those carried out by Palestinians are more often than not [...]

New-look An Phoblacht on sale now.
With more pages, more photos and more colour, the 32-page July issue includes…
Ballymurphy Massacre, 1971 - Prelude to Bloody Sunday?
The Parachute Regiment shot dead 11 people over 3 days in west Belfast in the wake of internment in 1971 and just months before being deployed in Derry

The so-called ‘dissidents’
Belfast activist [...]

I gave up on Irish journalism about 18 months ago, just after the 2008 bank guarantee scheme and the December budget of that year. And while this has done my blood pressure no end of good - it’s not the news that drives me mad, it’s the inane analysis - it also means that I [...]

Why did I think the Ernst & Young forecasts wouldn’t make big news? Did I really imagine that its key projections on the deficit and employment would provide a sobering counter-point to all the ‘whistling past the economic graveyard’ commentary we get everyday. Yet, the analysis is worth poring over in detail, not because E&Y [...]

The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols — Nation Books
What would Thomas Jefferson do?
That might seem an odd question for 21st-century analysts and activists to be posing. But the answer to that question in regards to journalism — that [...]

We are not Spain, we are not Italy, we are not Portugal. Repeat. We are not Spain, we are not Italy, we are not Portugal.
In one sense, that’s correct. In terms of the ‘market’ view of the Irish economy, we’re worse. But don’t expect commentators who have been demanding public spending cuts to point this [...]

The arrival of Matthew Elderfield a.k.a. The Financial Regulator a.k.a. The Regulator a.k.a. The Sheriff of Dodge City has been universally heralded by the media and political establishment as the second coming of Christ. Well, the Christ of ledgers, calculators and informal speeches at the Financial Services Ireland Conference anyway.
At a time when public sector workers and government are almost [...]