This week, indignant old men and women have led a wave of unprecedented social protest in the national media. Next week, the same old men and women will take their protest to the streets. The government may fall.
The primary issue may be medical cards but the core value at the heart of the [...]

Do the findings of the TASC survey, The Solidarity Factor - Public Perceptions of Unequal Ireland, published this week, represent a paradigm shift to the left among Irish adults, particularly among wealthier people?
According to the survey of 1000 adults interviewed in April this year, 70% believe wealth distribution in Ireland is unfair and 80% are concerned [...]

Night is gone, a dawn
comes up in birds and sounds of the city.
There will be light
to live by, things
to see: my eyes will lift
to where the sun in vermilion sits,
and I will love thee and have pity. (Michael Hartnett)
I’m sitting on the small fenced stone wall that surrounds the central bank on Dame Street, [...]

I’m standing at the corner of Cathal Brugha Street and Thomas Lane, waiting for my friend Lida to arrive. She’s starting up her own business soon, and wants me to write a blurb for the website. The buses are running a bit late but she gets here around 6.30pm and so we head off for [...]

The simplistic idea behind co-location - to create extra space for public patients in public hospitals by transferring the care of private patients currently occupying beds in those hospital to new private hospitals on the same campus, with the private sector encouraged to pay for these new hospitals through tax-based incentives - is deeply flawed. [...]

It is not the poverty
Of soil in Leitrim that makes me raise my hat
To fools with fifty pounds in a paper bank” (Lough Derg, Kavanagh)
A friend of mine is fond of saying, “he who tires of Bray, tires of life”. And there’s more than a line of truth in that one. As for myself, today [...]

Following developer Bernard McNamara’s decision to pull out of several regeneration projects proposed under a Public-Private Partnership arrangement with Dublin City Council, there has been some speculation regarding the future of another McNamara project. The Leargas consortium headed by McNamara - which also includes international prison operators GSL and Barclays Private Equity - has [...]

Last week, Cork man Trevor Casey was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for the rape and sexual assault of two teenage girls. During sentencing, the judge referred to a letter from Labour Deputy Kathleen Lynch indicating that Mr. Casey was from “a good family”. On Sunday, Deputy Lynch issued a statement accepting [...]

To most Irish political and media commentators, the Republic is a capitalist economy without a capitalist class structure. They argue that its citizens are mostly middle class, with a working class rump that exists on the margins. The past fifteen years, in their eyes, has seen an expansion of that middle class, as well [...]