Ireland

Friday

J P O'Malley

Interview: Mary Robinson

In 1990 Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female president. As a progressive liberal, Robinson seemed a very unlikely candidate for the job, in what was then, a deeply conservative country.  Throughout the 70s and 80s, she worked as a human rights lawyer, as well as a Senator, arguing a number of landmark cases that challenged various clauses in the Irish constitution that failed to protect minorities. Robinson fought on behalf of women, who were effectively treated as second-class citizens, homosexuals, who were criminalized for their sexual orientation, and she also campaigned to change the law on the sale of contraceptives, which were illegal in Ireland, without prescription, until 1985. When

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Kevin Barry’s magic

Reading a short story by Kevin Barry is a bit like listening to a kraut-rock-record from the 1970s. The foundations are built on a solid rhythm. Then every so often, the form veers left-field, unveiling a portal to a world of magic. In this sense, you could argue that Barry is an experimental writer. He spends considerable time wrestling with language, bending each turn of phrase and piece of dialogue into shape, until he’s convinced he can make it sing. As far as modulating with the form itself, Barry works from tradition: giving his readers short vignettes of isolated individuals — mostly men, who have failed in one way or

Friday

David Blackburn

A Jubilee moment of historic significance

Martin McGuiness will meet Her Majesty the Queen and shake her hand in Northern Ireland. This is a seminal moment. It does not change McGuiness’s commitment to a united Ireland, but it is a strong statement from the Republican side that bygones are bygones. It is also a sign, perhaps, that the sacrifices Britain made over the Bloody Sunday Inquiry where worthwhile, because McGuiness is making a brave sacrifice by doing this: there will be those who condemn him for it. It is also significant that the Palace has achieved this. The conflict in Northern Ireland and the dark historical relations between Britain and Ireland are causes close to the

Saturday

Paul Bew

And thereby hangs a tale

The heart sinks when news breaks that an already distinguished novelist is trying his or her hand at the Irish revolution. The track record is uninspiring. Anthony Trollope lived many years in Ireland and knew senior nationalist leaders like Isaac Butt; even so, The Land Leaguers (1882) is very disappointing. Iris Murdoch had deep roots in the Northern Irish middle class; despite, or because, of this The Red and the Green (1965) is again a failure by the standards of middle-period Murdoch. Raymond Queneau’s sado-erotic satire on the Easter Rising, We Always Treat Women Too Well (1947), was perhaps unfairly excluded from the official Gallimard edition of Queneau’s oeuvre until

Monday

Clarissa Tan

Bondholders are sheep — and they’re flocking out of the euro pen

Sweden’s Anders Borg (Fraser’s favourite finance minister) is wrong, says Citigroup. Bondholders and deposit holders are not like wolves, as Borg has made them out to be. They’re more like sheep — and currently they’re baa-a-a-cking out of the eurozone pretty quickly. We all know that money’s leaving the Continent — but how much and how rapidly? Citi’s credit strategist Matt King, basing his analysis on imbalances in TARGET2 (the euro area’s main payment settlement system) relative to eurozone countries’ current accounts, has come up with a few interesting observations. — Since mid-2011, Spain has suffered private-sector outflows of €100 billion, and Italy €160 billion (or a tenth of their

Thursday

Alex Massie

Cardinal Brady Should Resign

Last night, I finally watched last week’s BBC This World documentary investigating the latest stage of the child abuse scandal that is destroying the Catholic Church in Ireland and, like Jenny McCartney, suspect it is time for Cardinal Sean Brady, Primate of All-Ireland, to resign his post. I don’t suppose Cardinal Brady is a bad man, nor should one suppose that his resignation would draw some manner f line under the whole, sorry, rotten, scandalous affair. But it would be more than just a gesture too. William Oddie, writing in the Catholic Herald, plainly would prefer Brady to remain in office but accepts he “almost certainly” must “bow before the

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Up Down and More of This Irish Anarchy

A propos nothing at all except coming across it in a comment over at Slugger O’Toole, here’s a jolly tale of 1960s Irish anarchism: One day in the late 1960s, when we thought we’d heard the chimes of freedom flashing, I drove to Dublin with [John] McGuffin and the American anarchist Jerry Rubin. A mile or so out of Newry, McGuffin explained to the fabled member of the Chicago Seven that the town we were approaching was in the grip of revolution. The risen people had turned en masse to anarchism. We’d better barrel on through. If we stopped for a moment the fevered proletariat would surely engulf us… Down

Friday

Alex Massie

Bertie Ahern’s Greatest Trick: Shaming the Shameless

My friend Ciaran Byrne is right: If Rupert Murdoch owned Fianna Fail he’d close it down. The Mahon Tribunal’s report into the flagrant corruption at the heart of the planning process in County Dublin is a very Irish scandal. It is not surprising that senior Fianna Fail politicians were on the take, yet the extent of their corruption remains revelatory. It’s GUBU for the Celtic Tiger era. Now Bertie Ahern, the former Taoiseach once branded “the most skilfull, the most devious, the most cunning of them all” by Charlie Haughey (and he would know!), is set to be expelled from the party he dominated for a decade for “conduct unbecoming

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

What will the UK’s proposed ECHR reforms actually come to?

Two items of news that may unsettle stomachs in Euroland today: i) that Ireland is planning to hold a referendum on the new European fiscal treaty, and ii) that the UK is pushing — as April’s European summit in Brighton approaches — for the European Convention on Human Rights to be rewritten so that national courts have greater discretion and power. The BBC’s James Landale has more details on the latter here, but the basic point is that the government has circulated a ‘position paper’ that proposes injecting a few principles and particulars into the ECHR. One of these is ‘subsidiarity’, the idea that decisions should be made at the

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Irish Ask Another Brussels Question

And, as we know, Brussels has a habit of changing the answer any time anyone offers the wrong inconvenient answer. Nevertheless, the Irish government’s decision – made on the advice of the Attorney General – to hold a referendum on the latest EU “Stability Pact” is not, I hazard, likely to please everyone: “I am very confident that when the importance and merit are communicated to the Irish people that they will endorse it emphatically by voting yes to continuing economic stability and recovery,” the Taoiseach [Enda Kenny] said. The compact, agreed at special EU summit earlier this month, proposes tough new budgetary discipline on each euro zone state, including

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The forgotten victims of the Troubles

This post, marking the 40th anniversary of the Aldershot bombing, was published earlier on the Biteback website. But as its author, Douglas Murray, is a regular here on Coffee House, and as its subject matter is so important, we thought we’d re-post it here: The 30th January this year was the 40th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day when members of the British Parachute regiment shot dead fourteen civilians on the streets of a British city. The constant commemoration of that day by families of the dead and injured was one of the things that kept its memory alive and eventually led to the British government setting up the Saville

Monday

Alex Massie

Can Home Rule Solve Scotland’s Problems?

This is not a Question To Which the Answer Must Be No. I too saw the headline Now 51% Back Independence and thought, “Well, that’s interesting but implausible“. Then I noticed it was a Sunday Express splash and revised my appraisal to “That’s obviously cobblers”. And so it is, making it mildly foolish for SNP types to boast of a breakthrough on the back of a sample of 200 Scots that’s harldy more dispositive than polling, say, my Facebook pals. Nevertheless, Fraser’s post yesterday won’t quite do either. For instance, the boss writes: My hunch is that Cameron’s intervention will not have helped Salmond. The idea that an independent Scotland

Wednesday

Mats Persson

26 versus 1 — really?

Judging from much of the coverage in UK media, you would be forgiven for thinking that Britain is on the fast track to becoming the North Korea of Europe — eccentric and completely isolated from the rest of the world. Indeed, the media narrative over the past couple of days has largely treated the agreement reached at the summit as concrete, supported in full by everyone apart from Britain. Or ‘27-minus’, as Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso put it. The reality, of course, is quite different. Leaving aside whether Cameron could have played his cards better (he could have), as Gideon Rachman pointed out in yesterday’s FT, ‘the picture of

Friday

Alex Massie

Sarkozy’s Victory

This is, according to the Spitfire & Bullshit brigade, a great triumph for David Cameron and, more generally, for euroscepticism. If so, I’d hate to see what defeat looks like. What, precisely, has the Prime Minister vetoed? It seems to me that the Franco-German european mission remains alive and well and, if viewed in these terms, Britain has been defeated. That is, the price of a short-term tactical success may be a longer-term strategic defeat. Of course, the Prime Minister had to avoid a treaty that would, sure as eggs be eggs, be vetoed by the British people via a referendum. In that sense, he prevailed. But this is a

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Difficult Choices Are Never Easy

So spake the Taioseach, a Mr Enda Kenny of County Mayo, on Sunday night. Difficult choices are never easy. There is something near-fabulous about the phrase. It has certainly prokoked Fintan O’Toole most severely. He’s in rasping form this week Savour the phrase. Hold it to the light. Swirl it round the glass. Stick your nose in deep and inhale the rich aromas of full-bodied absurdity. Get the pungent whiff of carmelised cliche and curdled smugness. Imagine the work that went into crafting it, the bleary-eyed, caffeine-soaked speechwriters in their lonely eyrie, in the early hours of Sunday morning, running through the variations: hard choices are seldom soft; nasty things

Tuesday

Alex Massie

How To Lose An Argument: Jim Murphy Edition

Meanwhile, in more examples of sloppy Labour arguments here’s a tweet Jim Murphy sent this afternoon: Oh dear. Murphy is usually better than this. I know and everyone else who pays any attention to Scottish politics (this includes Jim Murphy) knows that Alex Salmond has long admired the Republic of Ireland’s low corporation taxes; he has almost never bothered talking about personal or consumption taxes. Furthermore, few sensible people think Ireland’s boom and bust was fuelled by or made significantly worse by its low rates of corporation tax. To hint otherwise, as Murphy seems to here, is either foolish or dishonest. It is possible to think low business taxes a

Friday

Alex Massie

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

The symbolism of this is pretty dire. These are still times for bitter melancholy in Ireland and many a Dubliner has rarely felt as republican as he does now that the state’s sovereignty* is, shall we say, not what once it was. This, a friend says, is just another tale of life “under the occupation”: Taoiseach Enda Kenny has rejected reports that details of next month’s Budget, including a planned hike in the VAT rate, were shown to German officials yesterday. Mr Kenny met chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin yesterday after which reports emerged that the Irish Government was planning raise the top rate of VAT by 2 per cent

Thursday

Mark Bathgate

Some context for the ongoing growth debate

Listening to Ed Miliband’s speech today, you’d be left with the impression that the UK is suffering a huge decline in government spending this year, and that this is to blame for most of our economic ills. The facts are a little different, as the below chart shows. The European Commission estimates that the UK is likely to have the second largest growth in government spending of any of the EU’s 27 members this year, clocking in at a robust 1.5 per cent increase for the year. Yet this has done nothing to help the UK’s relative growth performance. The UK is forecast to be the fifth slowest growing economy

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Italian domino effect

For all the debate about Theresa May and border security, the big news has not been at Westminster today. Instead, people have been watching what is happening in Italy. For it is far from certain that Europe, or the Western world for that matter, has a bucket bigger enough to bail out a country that owes more than Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain do combined. As the New York Times reports, the European Central Bank is reluctant to step in and start buying Italian bonds because it fears that its previous bond buying efforts have simply enabled the Italians to avoid necessary reforms. It feels that only market pressure will

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Ireland picks its President

Well, the oldie got it. Michael D. Higgins — commonly known as Michael D — has all but won the Irish presidential election. The little man who resembles a bard or a leprechaun, depending on your point of view, appears to have beaten off six undistinguished competitors to succeed the formidable Mary McAleese. At 70, he was the oldest in the field and looks, in fact, rather older. You could say it’s a victory for non-partisan, non-party politics. Mr Higgins was the Labour candidate but he stood aloof from the fray during the campaign, declining to criticise his opponents. That presidential stance went down well — it set him apart,