Claiming our Future is organising a national discussion on steps to reduce income inequality. The event will take place in NUI Galway on May 28th (the schedule is below). Registration is now open on the Claiming Our Future website.
This is the second half of a two-part interview. The first part is here. By Colin Murphy.
Gareth Peirce has been fighting for the rights of prisoners and the wrongfully accused since the mid 1970s, representing Judith Ward, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, amongst many others. Though her successes ultimately lead to a measure of legal celebrity (which she disavows), for many years the outlook was bleak. What sustained her?
Health, poverty and social justice concerns are all central aspects of food consumption and production, on both the local and the global level. By Sally Daly.
Do rich kids go to college more often than poor kids because they’re rich? Or are there personality, genetic and environmental issues at play? A groundbreaking new research project at the UCD Geary Institute attempts to tackle large socio-economic questions through an inter-disciplinary approach that will draw in expertise from economics, biology, neuroscience and psychology. By John Holden.
Twenty years ago, on 14 March 1991, the Birmingham Six were released. Colin Murphy interviews the woman who helped free them, Gareth Peirce. This interview was originally published in the Law Society Gazette, and is re-published here in two parts.
In London some years ago, an Egyptian dissident found himself threatened with deportation to his home country. There, he had agitated against the now-discredited Mubarak regime, and been tortured for his troubles. He had sought asylum in the UK, but had been detained.
Details of an independent audit to be undertaken into providing a clear picture of Ireland’s national debt were released yesterday, Wednesday 5 May. Areas of specific reference will include determining to whom the debt is owed, when it was incurred, how much of it is senior, guaranteed and subordinated debt, and when repayment is due to each creditor.
The plight of those stuck in reception centres while their claims for asylum are - slowly - processed is not a priority for government. However Justice Minister Alan Shatter has promised to review the overall situation. Catherine Kenny and Angela Long hope there will be some real justice for legitimate asylum-seekers
Eric Hobsbawm is summarily dismissive of social democracy in How to Change the World, writes Joseph Mahon
The claim that the Marxist classics offer no clear picture of communist society, or set of policies for that society, is a seductive one if you wish to distance Marx and Engels from Lenin, and from what Kolakowski and Judt call “the totalitarian outcome”. The founding fathers neither envisaged, nor advocated, such an outcome since they specified no outcome whatever, so they cannot be held responsible for the totalitarian one.
With a meagre investment of 3 million euro, Ireland could join the European-wide LOFAR radio telescope network that hopes to find, among other things, evidence for one of science’s most studied theoretical periods: the time just after the Big Bang. By John Holden.
What can you get for three million euro these days? A very fine house in leafy south Dublin? A golden handshake from AIB? Or maybe the opportunity to assist in proving the origins of the universe?
Science communication is a field fraught with difficulty, and one which the media has a poor track record on. On 20 April Dr Brian Hughes of NUI Galway gave a talk to the Irish Sceptics Society on the problems faced in communicating scientific research in a way that's both accurate and comprehensible. By John Holden.