There is a passage in Adam Phillips’s most recent book On Balance where he quotes Freud biographer Ernest Jones as observing that it is not the people we hate the most that we want to kill, but the people who arouse in us the most unbearable conflict. Thinking about its media campaign around its ‘crackdown’ on [...]

Elegy for Bettino Craxi (1934-2000)
- Bettino Craxi was leader of the Italian Socialist Party
and Prime Minister. He went into exile in 1994 and died in Tunisia.
Poor Bettino Craxi, you’ve been taken to your grave
and we won’t see your likes again.
Your social democratic bones were barely cold
when your obituaries began to bitch.
All week long it’s [...]

When I re-tweeted Labour Councillor Cian O’Callaghan’s news statement calling on Labour not to enter coalition with Fine Gael, Brendan Ogle suggested such an eventuality was akin to pigs flying. Maybe so. But then humans don’t fly either. So let’s take a hypothetical flight with our fellow unwinged mammals and see what the landscape looks [...]

….or if Cowen is secretly working for the opposition are Shortall and Rabbitte secretly working for the ULA?
The shenanigans over the past twenty four hours in relation to the Finance Bill, as noted by Harry McGee yesterday on the Irish Times website and quoted here… was indeed as he put it when…
“…both [Labour and Fine [...]

IPRT welcomes commitment to penal reform and imprisonment as a last resort but calls for clearer statement on Thornton Hall
The Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) welcomes the clear commitment to penal reform and imprisonment as a last resort included in the Labour Penal Reform Policy Document, which was launched today. IPRT believes this policy statement [...]

I’ve written about this issue here before, but some things deserve a second comment.
At the moment we have the combination (in Ireland as in several other northern countries) of an economic austerity package, an unpopular government tied to neoliberal economic policies more broadly, an ineffectual mainstream left pledged to the same basic [...]

The most important aspect of the most recent Irish Times poll was not the 32% for Labour, but the combined 45% for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
Individual polls tell you very little, it’s the overall trend that counts.
Since February 2009 Labour has scored from 20% to 25% in the MRBI polls. Their recent dramatic 10-point [...]

Sunday’s news that SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, would stand aside if he was re-elected as the MP for Foyle came as a surprise to almost everyone. It was assumed by many that his time as leader would be soon coming to an end, but the timing and the nature of his announcement to Mark Devenport [...]

It is no coincidence that the Lisbon Treaty, so strongly opposed by the far-right, has won support from the overwhelming majority of Socialist parties across Europe and from the European Trade Union Confederation (which groups together virtually all trade unions across Europe). The values and objectives set out in it are ones that are shared [...]