“In considering who should manage the last days of the decline of an empire, we are paralysed by the thought: If not Barack Obama then Mitt Romney”. William Wall reviews Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion by AK Press
William Wall argues that election results in France and Greece puts the left/right discourse firmly back on the map, after thirty years of right-wing hegemony. What is happening is the radicalisation of public discourse, a possibility that terrifies those who benefit most from the status quo. The Eighth of May was the Fête de la Victoire in France. […]
The controversy over Galway City Council’s proposal to erect a statue to Che Guevara to commemorate his family links to the city (his mother Anna Elizabeth was a Lynch and born in the city), is indicative of a wider discourse in Irish society. There is already a controversial – and popular – Che Guevara Festival in […]
The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity. The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running […]
The late Giovanni Arrighi, a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, compares western capitalism and the ‘industrious revolution’ of China – providing a useful insight into the history of world’s most populated country in the process.
Roberto Saviano’s non-fiction novel on the Camorra has earned him a death sentence and armed escort in Italy.
Many of us travelling to the European Writers’ Parliament, convened in Istanbul for that city’s Capital of Culture year, were puzzled. Taking its lineage from previous gatherings of writers (during the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the occasion of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, etc), it seemed to us that this parliament lacked a focus. We […]
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) – squibs, memoranda, appreciations of […]
Irish writers are more insiders than outsiders now. We have the Arts Council to give us bursaries, albeit much reduced since the Depression began; we have Aosdána to support us in our old age; we have Ireland Literature Exchange to help our work into translation, there are grants for travel, there’s Writers in the Schools, […]
The Ryan Report into the abuse of children in Irish schools run by Roman Catholic religious organisations is a sobering document. Its contents are so shocking that it takes a certain act of will to believe in its findings. Reports of sexual violence of every conceivable kind co-exist with descriptions of systematic or casual brutality […]
