Ireland
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Your correspondent offers a special edition of Profiles in Scourge: a group profile covering the Martin family, otherwise styled the Green Party. I As a function of the stipulation in Bunreacht na hÉireann that the number of Government Ministers must not exceed fifteen, the State presently finds itself with extraordinary ministerial titles that combine multiple…
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It amazes Macdara that our Tánaiste is only 63, since he seems to have been hanging around the Cabinet since the middle of the last century, and in all honesty could pass for 83; put him next to Biden and you have to wonder which is which. What must a man of such lengthy service…
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We’ve been working on the Santa Claus issue for a number of weeks now emmm and it’s important to say to all children in the country emmm that we regard emmm Santa Claus’s travels eh as essential travel for essential purposes and therefore he is exempt eh from the need to self-quarantine for fourteen days…
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US President Kennedy arranged for a book to be published in his name in 1956, Profiles in Courage. To honour the quality of current Irish politicians, Macdara hereby inaugurates a new feature for this site: Profiles in Scourge. And who better to start off with than our head of government, though when the present writer…
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The logic of the Occupied Territories, which is to say, the logic of Partitionism as it operates in the colonial entity, can be summarised as sure aren’t both sides as bad as each other, with the additional observation that in between these apparent twin extremes we find a growing—always growing—centre ground. This petty exercise requires…
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The attempted rejection of Comparison when it comes to Northern Ireland—that is, the rejection of history, of naming the Occupation Administration as a settler colonial project, an ongoing act of violence—has as a quite natural corollary the need to encourage the promotion of a new species of vocabulary, the specimens of which remind the observer…
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We witnessed in 2016 a commemoration of the Easter Rising and the Proclamation of the Republic; other terms were used, certain old wars being continued into the Present with words in place of arms. An extraordinary poster in a prominent site in Dublin commemorated four people for the occasion, Henry Grattan, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart…
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We can expect, as the polling for His Majesty’s Glorious Union carries on sinking to a level beyond which even a few Irish Times readers might notice that the word majority can no longer be comfortably applied, that Partitionists will develop an interest in alternative means of gauging the strength of the Eternal Union. If…
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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;…
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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…