Ireland: A Manifesto for Anti-Immigration Activism
When a few hundred thousand Greeks confronted the Persian world-system with a radical rejection of all it stood for, and refused to be absorbed, it seemed to all the Persians and to some intelligent Greeks mere pigheaded nationalism. But it...
Aontú: Friend or Foe?
The Potential of Tóibín-ism: Ten years since the economic crash, Irish politics is a graveyard of parties that have attempted to fill an imagined political vacuum. Reports of the death of our two (and a half) party state have been...
Atlanticism and Ireland’s Post-Brexit Dilemma
Brexit and the English Connection: In cynical geopolitical terms, Ireland exists as the Western European equivalent of Belarus. An English speaking cultural appendage of Anglo-America surviving off FDI and with a monetary policy set in Brussels. For all the fanfare...
Why The Good Friday Agreement Will Fail
“Secular liberals and socialists expected tribal passions would gradually disappear, while improved means of communication and a better scientific understanding of the universe would take its place. But it turned out not to be so.” - Leszek Kolakowski Ireland’s Fukuyama...
The Resurrection of Hungary: A Modern Parallel for Ireland
“The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, such as freedom, etc. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific,...
Graham Linehan and the End of Irish Public Life
The New Anti-Culture Wars: For the past 50 years liberal Ireland has styled itself as a counter-cultural force fighting against the tide of a conservative establishment in the form of Church and State. While questionable, this at least provided a...
Edmund Burke and the Irish Canon
“Berkeley proved that the world was a vision, and Burke that the State was a tree, no mechanism to be pulled in pieces and put up again, but an oak tree that had grown through centuries” -W.B. Yeats Burke and the 20th Century: The Irish 20th century left many casualties in its wake. As the century drew to...
The Making of the ‘New Ireland’
“Ireland had clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, and Reconstruction to the very last.” ― Seán Ó Faoláin Ireland: Between the Idea and the Reality Oftentimes...
Why Didn’t the Irish Rebel? Explaining Post-Crash Inertia
The question of how the Irish elite avoided being overthrown, if not publicly hanged, in the aftermath of the Great Recession must surreptitiously linger in the minds of those in the corridors of power to this day. Despite the recent...
The Irish Presidential Election Doesn’t Matter and Distracts Us From Real Issues
A future Irish historian glancing over some of the headlines in the Autumn of 2018 would be surprised at the national fixation with the 2018 Irish Presidential Election. This fixation could have been forgiven had the race been dogged with...