With the gap between church and state in Ireland finally beginning to widen, the Catholic Church's control over education will only weaken as time goes by. But, as Mark Cullinane argues, rather than grasp the opportunity to institute something resembling a liberal education, we have chosen merely to swap one dogma for another - the worship of Capital.
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The global media has been nervously covering two simultaneous forms of destruction: the obliteration of wealth in the financial markets and the destruction of property in the United Kingdom. This destruction involves different actors, objects, temporalities, and spatial scales. The looting by youths in the UK had a short-term temporality and has been territorially contained to one nation.
The details of how and why the public sphere has been systematically looted may not be very clear to Britain's rioters, but they feel its effects. Their lives are looted. They have nothing to lose. By William Wall.
The experience of police harrassment and violence is an everyday one for many people in many communities, and we need to interrogate the idea that such aggression is automatically legitimate. By Illan Rua Wall.
In his classic text The Sociological Imagination, C Wright Mills observed that ‘men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction… the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live.’ [1] He argued that the job of sociologists therefore was to relate personal troubles ‘within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others’ to ‘matters that transcend these local environments’. [2] In other words for Mills, sociologists and other public intellectuals should help people t
With the freeing up of information through technology come new crises of legitimacy for those who once controlled that information. Deterritorial Support Group ask whether these crises are, in fact, an opportunity.
There are general and easy readings of Ulster loyalism for which many method actors, as if casting for The Sopranos, write the script that tabloid journalism adores. The appearance of the tattooed sectarian – or, as Fintan O’Toole would have it, ‘an idiocy that comes with a fragmented culture’ - is as obvious as Ireland’s financial plight – although the latter was due to another form of thuggery that employed greater charm.
When the East Belfast riots erupted in late June, few who work in and with working class communities were surprised. We had known for some time that the UVF was recruiting young people and threatening to organise mass riots if its command structures – sorry, that should of course read ‘community workers’ – weren’t guaranteed ongoing funding after EU Peace money runs out in 2012.
The challenge that faces political actors in Northern Ireland is to offer real choices to ordinary people and to provide the leadership and encouragement that will enable these choices to be realised. The priority, in other words, has to be building a shared future based on tolerance and mutual respect instead of propagating division and segregation.
