A Look at the 2020 Democratic Primaries
Biden vs. Bernie: All of the major 2020 Democratic candidates for president of the United States have formally launched their campaigns. It is an extremely diverse field. We have an octogenarian socialist who owns three houses, terrorist sympathizers, and a...
Airstrip One: The Slow Death of Freedom in the UK
What is happening in the UK is terrifying. No, I’m not talking about Brexit, the event that has gripped news media and turned it into a frenzy. I’m referring to far more important matters. Matters that, if left unchecked, will...
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...
Online Hate Speech Laws Are Coming to Ireland
After the last number of years of looking across the Irish sea in abject horror at the police state the UK is rapidly becoming, it seems that the reaper has finally come for us too, just as we always knew...
The Underhanded Neo-Gombeens
I had a chat once with my old landlady about the meaning of that word 'gombeen' prompted by Varadkar appearing on the telly one evening. She said “I don't think there's any gombeens left anymore.” She spoke as if 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...
The Catholic Right Needs to Unify in Order to Survive
Political commentators often espouse the view that the ‘Catholic Right’ in modern ireland is a coherent bloc with political heft. A bloc with influence enough left over to bring about much of what it seeks in policy. This is a...
Fine Gael’s Housing Crisis
Ireland’s ongoing housing crisis has provided a discordant note to the official government narrative that we are somehow living in a golden age. The figure of 10,000 homeless is only the tip of the iceberg. For a generation of renters...
A Vanishing Ireland
The Great Famine of the 1840s was undoubtedly the most catastrophic event in Ireland's history. With an estimated one million dead and another million lost to emigration, the population of the island fell by around 25% in the space of...
Lessons from Fiction: Sauron and the State
The Lord of the Rings ranks as one of the greatest works of fiction of all time. Few great stories would be complete without a great villain – and J.R.R Tolkien’s masterpiece is no exception. In Sauron, the eponymous Lord...