Browse the links below or head over to politico.ie/crisisjam to see it in all its glory.

They make a desert and they call it peace
Radical analyses of the Irish and European debt crisis can benefit from engagement with some mainstream (or even right-wing) analyses - there is much to be learned there, and sometimes a surprising [...]

I woke early this morning and, as always on such occasions, my conscience got to me - atheists have notoriously active consciences. I’m inclined to think I may have wronged poor Davie Adams. An Dorcha is right that his former associations shouldn’t matter and anyway the situation in the North of Ireland at the time [...]

Book Review: Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, Fintan O’Toole, Faber, £12.99
Suppose you were swept to power on the back of a massive popular vote - say something like 80%, the kind of number that usually has the USA and its client states jumping up and down and calling you a leftist [...]

And the big difference in twenty years? Money. Lots of it now. Back then, not enough.’ (Aine Lawlor, May 2006)
On 31 May 2006 RTE broadcast a ninety-minute documentary entitled That Was Then, This is Now. It consisted of nine personal reflections on Ireland and the changes the country underwent from 1986 to 2006. The contributors [...]

Fintan O’Toole is an intelligent and thought provoking commentator.
His new book, Enough Is Enough, offers 50 proposals for political and social reform. Many offer sensible and credible solutions to the failures of our current system and are remarkably similar to Sinn Fein’s current policy agenda. Others, while not to the tastes of this writer, are [...]

I’d like to mention something that is going on at the moment and which I’m contributing to with a number of bloggers, academics and activists. It’s called Budgetjam, an attempt to disrupt the debate lead by the rightwing around the economy and to provide a resource for people opposing the bankrupting of Ireland.
First of all, [...]

Recent political performances require a new verb. Imagine, if you will, a talk given to an audience where the speaker is discussing an object sitting between him and the audience. The object is clearly black but the speaker refers to it throughout his talk as white. He does this without irony giving no hint that he [...]

There’s a whole new narrative around exports at the moment, in the Irish Times anyway, which is effectively a mouthpiece for the government’s economic policy at present and as good an indicator as any of where the Right’s head is at when thinking about this particular stage of the Irish depression.
Michael Taft wrote about this [...]

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 [...]