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 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.

Why has Pat Rabbitte failed to act on the issue of concentration of media ownership? By Vincent Browne. 

Last year, the businessman Denis O'Brien addressed the proper role of the owner/controller of a media enterprise, saying that the owner/controller should act "at an appropriate distance from editorial matters" and should be aware of "the responsibility that rests with media owners not to interfere with editorial content”.

There is hardly anything for which Labour stands, or rather stood, that it has not dishonoured in government in the last 22 months. By Vincent Browne.

Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore entered electoral politics via student politics and trade union politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Together they have done more than most to engender cynicism about politics generally from an early stage in their political careers and together, in government, they have done more than most to add to the mountain of cynicism there is now about politics.

We have the resources to deal with all our problems. All we need is the political will to use them. By Vincent Browne.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has started the season on a positive note, which we all might try to emulate in 2013.

He said at the turn of the new year that 2013 would be the "year of recovery" and that the Irish presidency of the EU would bring "new hope" to people in the midst of the economic crisis.

Is there a significant moral difference between killing and letting die? By Vincent Browne.

Enda Kenny was afforded some further ammunition to target Sinn Féin by the recent revelations about Dessie Ellis, the Sinn Féin TD for Dublin North West, who certainly has questions to answer about the number of people killed or maimed via the bombs he assembled or helped to assemble during the decades of the Northern Ireland conflict.

There is little prospect of this wretched government losing office in 2013, but there is quite a prospect of defections, humiliations and betrayals, starting with abortion. By Vincent Browne.

Fine Gael's indifference to the promises it, and its leader, made on abortion is matched by its indifference to integrity.

That the promises made were ignorant and silly is immaterial.

Both Fine Gael and Labour are as one in their determination to expel from their ranks any parliamentarian who votes in accordance with the pledges on which those two parties sought and obtained their mandates. By Vincent Browne.

Enda Kenny has reiterated that there will be no free vote on the abortion legislation which is to be introduced in the Dáil early next year.

We should have known from the awful blather and bombast of the Labour manifesto that we were being set up for another con job. By Vincent Browne.

Just last year, in February of last year, they were talking of a new politics. No more the cronyism, stroke politics, abuses of corporate and political power.

Even though there are another three years to go to an election, the goose is already cooked for many Labour TDs. By Vincent Browne.