Ireland
-
Writing about the census conducted in the Occupied Territories in 2021 presents the familiar problem of distinguishing between a religious label as it refers to religious practice, compared to its use as a stand-in for ethnic identity. The census collected two slightly different sets of figures, asking questions about religion, and about religion of upbringing;…
-
With this, your correspondent introduces a new category: Ancient Grudge, whereby he complains about something from the past that has pissed him off enough that he has had to write about it to get it out of his system. Macdara has long been fascinated by the functioning of groups, and in particular the tendency of…
-
The comedy of choice for the Partitionist elite is a niche publication known as the Irish Times. This outlet has courageously been describing ever smaller numbers as a majority when it comes to the issue of the Occupation. We should not expect it to be deterred by its own recent daring in describing the 50%…
-
It is well known that one particular area in which Irish people were far outside international norms—the provision of standard reproductive healthcare—was partially dealt with by means of a landslide referendum result that heroically gifted Irish women only a restricted legal abortion regime, in place of the obvious cruelty of the previous extremely restricted regime.…
-
RTÉ reports that the English government wants to revive the imperial system of measurements—which, Macdara has noticed, certain educated English people, possibly from a clever unconscious desire to deny the imperial legacy upon which they have suckled, refer to as the empirical system, as ingenuously as they refer to the English rather than the Latin…
-
Ulster was the site of the greatest resistance to colonialism. For this, it was subject to the greatest usurpation: extensive settler colonialism. There is no secret here. The heirs to this occupation boast of it, dream of it, live it. It is the condition of their being. They hate the natives with the familiar venom of settler colonists anywhere who…
-
As capitalism is predicated on inequality, so all parties in a capitalo-democratic system find they must take at least one step to the right to facilitate a general Law-and-Order Liberalism, which the present writer fears can only give way to a final march to the right, and it will, for many, be final. Recall that even…
-
Irish gives us a word, a tricky conjuring thing, to use for this difficult order of phenomenon: the thing that exists only in belief, in play, but for that reason can be said to exist, with all the consequences that follow. Let us use the word: geis. Taboo, prohibition, injunction, spell, vow, curse. It binds, it breaks; forces,…
-
If you have heard of the Border, then you must know that there is no Border. People who believe in the Border believe in something that they know does not exist. Those who believe in the Border have been allowed to indulge in a fancy with grotesque consequences for what we might loosely call the real…