CrisisJam

Of the many fulsome initiatives intended to normalise the trauma of forced emigration, an ad campaign for a soft drink goes in at number one with a bullet. By purchasing the product of this global corporation, you enter a draw for the prize of bringing back a group of your recently emigrated friends. They will, if you are successful, be back in Ireland on Saint Patrick's Day for 'the craic'. Recession-busting pizza might give you heartburn, but as Hugh Green examines, there's nothing like an emigration-busting soft drink to ease the heart ache.

Remaking the country in one’s image, or at least in ways that fit snugly with one’s interests, is all the rage among Ireland’s golfing cosmopolitan elite. On the day when Ed Walsh called for the implementation of economic ‘martial law’, Patrick Barry examines Dermot Desmond’s drive to become Ireland’s leading political moustache.

Dermot Desmond has jetted in for the weekend to join the chorus of voices calling for political reform. Jason Walsh examines several branches of the new reformation, and argues that what they have in common is distrust of the electorate.

The power of neoliberal discourse lies in how it contaminates and thrives on the established language we use to discuss politics and society. In particular, ideas of ‘freedom’ and the ‘individual’ now mainly operate in a shrivelled register of economic instrumentality. Audrey Bryan examines how praise of human resilience has come to mean Croppy lie down.

Remember when Ireland was but a straw blown about and broken by the ill winds of global collapse? When it was Lehman Brothers wot did it? As the austerity agenda becomes more deeply embedded as the touchstone of Irish political realism, any sustained analysis of what the global capitalist crisis actually meant for Ireland recedes. Patricia K Wood examines the shrinking geography of crisis and conceivable responses.

A weekly round-up of what the CrisisJammers have been reading, watching and listening to.

Ready for Victory Celebration!

Where: The Met Bar, Clifton Court, Eden Quay

When: Sunday 20 February 5-10pm

Vigil against the continuing US military use of Shannon Airport

Where: GPO Dublin

When: Wednesday, 23 February, 4-6pm.

A common theme of the crisis has been the idea that the eyes of the world are on Ireland, a coded – and sometimes not so coded – way of tellings dissenters to button it for fear their flappy jaws will land us in even more trouble with those we like to call our European ‘partners’, for want of a better word to describe them. Business, policy and media elites, eager to embrace what they see as the shiny cosmopolitanism of an imaginary Europe in the sky, are slow to point out that European institutions may not have the best interests of all classes of Irish society at heart.

With electoral annihilation pending for Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin’s election as that party’s leader had the potential to be interesting only for its facilitation of yet another round of ‘where have all the fadas gone?’ But, writes Harry Browne, his ‘prolier-than-thou’ posturing in last Tuesday’s leaders’ debate may signal an opportunistic shift by his party that, while intellectually incredible, may be politically important in the years to come.

Cuts in funding and resources hit those schools which cater for children with special needs and children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds hardest, and are being imposed across the public education system. Meanwhile, private fee-paying schools, which rank 'close to the bottom of the table' in their provision for children with learning difficulties, received €100 million in state subsidies last year. Alison Spillane reports.