Category: Articles
The Garda Diversity and Integration Strategy is an Orwellian Nightmare
Hate speech, hate crimes and hateful thoughts are at the centre of current thinking in official Ireland and things are progressing apace on this front in recent days. The most important change is the Garda Síochána Diversity and Integration Strategy...
The Overton Hourglass
June, 2003: shortly after take-off, an ultralight aircraft crashes near Caro, Michigan. The pilot is a newlywed man in his early forties. He dies in the wreckage. His name was Joseph Overton. In the world of politics, however, Joseph Overton...
Brexit Is Pointless with Tories at the Helm
Post-war British life has largely been a stay of execution. The former superpower has largely stumbled through the past 70 years of societal rot that laid the seeds for the political crisis that is Brexit. The old adage stands true...
The Decline of Poetry
In 2016, the organisers of the Rose of Tralee announced that contestants would no longer be allowed to recite a poem as their onstage party piece. The explanation was that poetry was “slowing down the flow of the show”. The...
Defending Dev: Irish Neutrality in WW2 was justified
Dev’s Ireland dodges a bullet Amid the perpetual turmoil of Brexit, a historic occasion passed by almost unnoticed in the Irish public square. The Emergency Powers Act passed through the Oireachtas on the 3rd of September 1939 de facto commenced...
The Connolly Youth Movement is where the Left goes to die
“I have long been of opinion that the Socialist movement elsewhere was to a great extent hampered by the presence in its ranks of faddists and cranks, who were in the movement, not for the cause of Socialism, but because...
The Political Cudgel
In a recent political podcast, Radicalisation and the Amplification of Extremism Online, the Irish Times make clear that they have no intention of allowing “Gemma O’Doherty or any of her supporters” on their current affairs podcasts. One would presume that...
Ir-ish: Michael Brendan Dougherty and Erosions of Éire
Nationalism usually does not spring from the meatheaded conviction that one’s nation is best in every way, but from something like a panicked realization that nobody in authority or around you is taking the nation seriously, that everyone is engaged...
Victory or Greed: Rejecting ‘Respectable’ Conservatism
The Irish people have possessed an indomitable will to endure. We have survived genocide and forced famine, rebellion and repression, invasion and suppression, plantation and a host of other evils employed by imperialists to destroy nations like our own. And...
Elections, Europe, and Irish Freedom: A Talk With Hermann Kelly
The European Union is not the immutable behemoth it once was. The political bloc, although once appearing to be seemingly invincible, is starting to show its cracks. Largely as a result of the 2015 migrant crisis, as well as the...