Thinking Deep
An academic discipline based on idealised economic systems which permit the application of a great deal of theoretical sophistication has produced cohorts of graduates with little knowledge of history or the real world. These idiot savants can manipulate mathematical models but have little to contribute to actual business practice or economic management.
Pregnant, Seeking Asylum
In 2004 a majority endorsed the removal of the right to citizenship of children born in Ireland to non-Irish parents. Along the way, pregnant women legally seeking asylum were cast as illegal immigrants abusing Irish hospitality. A new book argues that an intersection of racism, sexism, and a ‘heteronormative’ ideology lies behind Irish immigration policy.
Commemorating what? And why?
Our acts of remembrance in this decade of commemoration should perhaps include some consideration of the failures of the past as well as its successes, and indeed the failures of the present. And might this not be a good time to have done with militarism once and for all?
Captain Mighthavebeen
The mid-1960s saw a relaxation of old certainties among both communities in Northern Ireland. The unionist leader Terence O’Neill was conscious that it was necessary to offer some remedy to the discrimination that Catholics suffered, but even his mild measures of reform did not win majority support within his own community.
The Red and the Green
Ireland long had two parties competing for the favour of the Soviet Union. One was to remain tiny and irrelevant; the other found that its strategy of formulating ‘reformist demands in the mouth of a revolutionary party’ was not sustainable as reformism became for leading members not a pose but their real ideological home.
Do the right thing
The debate over ethics and the role it might or might not play in economic life sparked by recent comments from President Higgins could be informed by a study of the Irish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson, who posited an objective source for our feelings of right and wrong.
The Road to Partition
At times the Irish question in its final parliamentary phase resembles a vast deserted asylum whose last inhabitants are its historians, who begin to fear that having arrived as visitors they have become confined as inmates.
Where we are
We are, somewhat unsurprisingly, where we are. But how did we get there? And does our constitution have anything to do with it? It can be argued that the 1937 assemblage of principles has served us well. But who exactly has it served well? The property-owners or the people?
1916 As Spectacle
In an age when martyrdom is demonised and tagged with notions of fanaticism and people are reluctant to protest for a cause let alone die for one, 1916 presents an easy target.
Getting Beyond No
There are stirrings in Ulster Loyalist groupings which may, if they mature, disprove the old cliché that Northern Protestants have no culture other than the Orange Order and Rangers football club.