On the 24th of February last TASC presented its first “TASC Encounters” evening at the Royal Irish Academy with Fintan O’Toole talking to Mark Mortell, communications consultant and Newstalk 106 presenter. The event proved to be so popular that tickets to attend were quickly scooped up and with limited capacity in the RIA many who [...]

There’s another angle on the George Lee saga that is as interesting to media watchers as any consideration of whether he was ‘frozen out’ of Fine Gael or a victim of his own ego.  Let’s put aside too whether Enda Kenny wasted a brilliant talent or had simply expected Lee to take a little time to settle into politics [...]

With due apologies to Søren Kierkegaard, it is with ‘Fear and Trembling’ that I put fingers to keyboard to contribute to the burgeoning media orgy, commonly known as the “George Lee Phenomenon”.
Since the ‘earth-shattering’ news that George Lee has decided to withdraw his support from Fine Gael and quit the Dáil, the media have had [...]

So George Lee has resigned.  No doubt this will fill newspaper columns and blog posts with analysis of what this means for Fine Gael, Enda Kenny (will he be pushed?, the Government and, of course, George.  So far the one question that has not been answered - and not raised much either - is:  what [...]

An interesting comment on the allegations surrounding Gerry Adams brother was added to a piece on the topic on Irish Left Review a couple of weeks ago. It’s one of three comments, but is of considerable utility in pointing up some of the problems implicit in the issue…
“It would be unworthy of a left-wing blog [...]

[The ruling class has constructed] two parallel universes, one in which there seems to be an endless amount of money that can be put into the banking system and another where we have to attack the blind, the disabled, children and the unemployed. It’s remarkable how successful this crude strategy of distracting and dividing people [...]

Yesterday’s editorials of The Irish Times and The Irish Examiner are politically instructive, that is to say, they illustrate a situation in which politics cannot take place. The differences in tone tell us much about their minimal market/political differentiation. The crowing populism of the Examiner still imagines that it hears the Fine Gael Ard Fheis [...]

Everyone knows the Irish Examiner is a Fine Gael newspaper and everyone equally knows that even if Fianna Fail is being obnoxious about public sector workers, Fine Gael would be even worse.  The incessant cry from FG over the past two years has been for the savaging of the sector.  ‘More! More!’ they scream like a mob [...]

The furore over Mahmoud Ahmajinedad’s apparent success in last months Iranian presidential elections tells us a few important things about how the dominant media feels democratic deficiencies, alleged or otherwise, should be reported.
According to the Irish Times Iran’s “suffocating theocracy”1 sustained a crisis of legitimacy “after it lost the trust of millions of Iranians”2 following [...]

On the One News at One, RTE’s business editor David Murphy concluded his piece on the National Treasury Management Agency’s Annual Report:
‘The other problem is that the credit rating agencies have downgraded Ireland’s debt. International markets will want to see serious spending cuts so the country can stop bleeding money day after day.’
There are three [...]