FC Barcelona is one of the most successful football clubs in the world and, although like most of the big football clubs around the world. Unlike almost all of the major Premiership clubs elsewhere in Europe, FC Barcelona is not owned by an oligarch or even by a cabal of oligarchs, is owned by its 175,000 members who each pay an annual membership fee of around €200. It is a not-for-profit organisation; nobody gets paid dividends, although the players are among the richest in the world. BY Vincent Browne.

The exchequer deficit in Ireland was €1.6 billion at the beginning of 2008. The exchequer deficit at the start of 2013 was €15 billion. Over the corresponding five years from 2008-2012 inclusive, the total 'savings' by way of public sector pay cutbacks, public spending cutbacks and tax increases amounts to €24.4 billion. By Dr. Tom O'Connor of Cork Institute of Technology

Laura Agustín is renowned for her ground-breaking research, writing and advocacy on migration, sex work and trafficking. Her writing is available on her blog The Naked Anthropologist and in her highly acclaimed book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. Writing frequently about the sex workers she has worked with, she has attracted controversy from those who would rather see sex work and prostitution completely abolished.

On Wednesday, March 20, UCD Women’s Studies hosts renowned sociologist, Prof. Hill Collins for a  public lecture entitled ‘Where do we go from here? Intersectionality and Social Justice’. Prof. Hill Collins specialises in critical race theory and feminist theory, and is perhaps best known for her work on intersectionality, that is, the notion that people are often subject to multiple and mutually reinforcing disadvantages based on gender, race, or class, for instance. Below, Prof.

The idea, now enshrined in our Constitution, that there is an equal right to life of the unborn child and of the mother is nonsense. By Vincent Browne.

A new person, a girl, has come into the lives of people I know. She has not yet been named but the attachment to her is very real. Her grandfather can hardly wait for a time to play with her and to make her laugh. But there is a problem at present.

She isn’t born yet and the thought of anything happening to her, at this vulnerable stage of her life, is awful to anybody close to the family.

The Irish political establishment will no doubt use its presidency of the EU to paint a rosy picture of a ‘social' European Union. But such a picture will jar dramatically with the reality of an EU that is the driving force in the austerity destroying lives in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. By Paul Murphy and Kevin Henry.

Last week, we published a piece, The true value of John Waters, which speculated as to the possible value, in cold hard cash, of controversial opinion columns to a newspaper website’s bottom line.

Historians’ understanding of the development of the Provisional IRA in the 1970‘s and its transition into a smaller, leaner but more politically attuned group - the precursor of the body that endorsed the Republicans’ journey into the peace process - may have to be revised in the light of a recently acquired British military account of a crucial phase in the war between the IRA and the British Army. By Ed Moloney and Bob Mitchell. 

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Ireland may not win football’s European Championship but when it comes to banking debt we are Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester United all rolled into one with Real Madrid for a bench. By Michael Taft.

Whatever the reasons for cutting public sector employment and or pay, reducing the deficit is not one of them. By Michael Taft.

With negotiations over an extension of the Croke Park Agreement starting yesterday, it is helpful to remind ourselves how daft it is to downsize the public sector payroll in the hopes it will reduce the deficit.