Michael D’s Memory
Liam Kennedy writes: Sociologists, unlike historians, have long memories. My evidence for this – historians like evidence – is a sample of one, the former president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.
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For the Little People
Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.
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Fleeing the Russian State
Alexander Obolonsky writes: Russia has something positive to present – both to itself and to the world. Alongside the dominant culture of subjugation, an alternative counter-culture of resistance has always existed and survived, even in the darkest times.
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Dropping the mask
Andy Storey writes: the old, better-managed order mourned by the writers in Foreign Affairs was no less violent and exploitative than Trump’s grotesque carnival of hustle and hubris.
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Reasoning Animals
Stephen O’Neill writes: What is stopping a conversation about a United Ireland which doesn’t knowingly inhabit the same structures that it seeks to replace, or repeat the same cliches and reinscribe the same privileges that those structures have perpetuated?
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The Berlin Fringe?
Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: The fiasco marring this year’s Berlin Film Festival shows once again that the most vital art does not emerge from approval but thrives on the margins. A lesson the BFF needs to (re)learn.
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Evidence of fullness
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date, Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish.
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Party Time Over?
Michael Laver writes: While ‘The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t’ by Didi Kuo adds to a burgeoning ‘decline of parties’ literature, are we to believe that this decline is part of a global pattern or more specific to the US?
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Centenary of ‘The Plough and the Stars’
Bess Rowen writes: 11 February 2026 marked a century since protesters disrupted Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ by singing nationalist songs and rushing the stage.
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Semantic Escalation
Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant.