On March 8, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy published a comprehensive report whose title speaks for itself: The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The report arrives at the same conclusion as the former Trump administration and states that China’s treatment of the Uyghurs meets all of […]
“Asylum seekers”, you might note, is not a phrase that ever appears these days, in most of the media. And it certainly does not appear in Government news releases. Instead, the new, PR-friendly term is “international protection applicants”. And said international protection applicants got good news yesterday, courtesy of Roderic O’Gorman and Simon Harris: Today, […]
Hairdressers will be closed until May, the Taoiseach said yesterday, meaning that those of us who survive lockdown will emerge, eventually, into the sunshine, with hair and beards flowing like the cavemen of yore. But that’s only if we survive what NPHET says is the latest “dangerous moment” of the never-ending pandemic: Ireland could be […]
The first-ever papal visit to Iraq should raise awareness about the challenges facing Iraqi Christians – a majority of whom are Catholic. In the past two decades, the Christian population in Iraq has fallen by over 80%. The 1987 Iraqi census reported that there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, and today it is estimated that the […]
It is an interesting thing that the family squabbles of the rich and well connected should be of such universal and compelling interest. When RTE, along with networks across the globe, screen a two hour long interview with two exiled royals on prime viewing time, it must say a lot about the extent of our interest […]
Yesterday in the Dáil the Taoiseach was questioned by a number of TD’s on his dialogue and meetings with the various churches, faith groups and non-confessional bodies. These meetings are part of what is termed the Church State Structured Dialogue Process, which was established in 2005 and forms part of what the Government calls […]
There’s been a lot of attention given, in the lockdown-sceptical parts of the Irish internet, in recent days, to the results of a freedom of information request made by a website called freepress.ie. Here’s what they say: Freepress.ie can exclusively reveal that Irish hospitals were never under strain throughout 2020, based on newly released official […]
The preliminary agenda for the annual conference of the Teachers Union of Ireland has been released, and with it, a list of motions that the Union is set to debate when it gathers for that conference later this spring. Top of the agenda is motion 177, introduced by the Dublin branch of the TUI, which […]
The Irish Bishops’ Conference has criticised the inertia of the government in addressing concerns of the religious in Ireland – a watershed moment as up to now, the Bishops have instructed priests across the country to adhere to Government restrictions. The Bishops have collectively, publicly, called on the Government to ease the restrictions on public […]
‘Facts tell, stories sell,’ according to the advertising maxim. Leaving the question of whether an advertising maxim should have anything to do with news or journalism, clearly in contemporary times, it does. In recent Irish history, for example, we can trace the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the long-running campaign by activists to tell […]
Legalised euthanasia is only a few weeks away in the Australian state of Tasmania. The End-of-Life Choices bill passed through the lower house of the Tasmania Parliament this week and moved to the upper house, where it is expected to pass easily. It will be the third of Australia’s six states to pass a euthanasia […]
The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has just released its statistics on the number of work permits issued to Irish companies for February 2021. Despite the Covid crisis, there has been little change in the numbers of people arriving in Ireland to take up jobs when huge numbers of people already here are dependent […]