In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, his Encyclical Letter on Caring for our Common Home. Five years on, his appeal to every person on this planet remains as relevant. “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and… Read more »

  As we go to press with this issue of Working Notes, we at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice are keenly aware of how the theme of “Integral Ecology” might appear distant from the pressing concerns of the pandemic. But appearances can deceive. While Pope Francis does not mention the risk of novel… Read more »

As the community and voluntary sector is increasingly shaped by the need to constantly generate evidence of outcomes, practitioners can become attuned to the expectation of the “knowledge” which should be produced.

Jubilee Caribbean (JCaribbean) is a newly formed non-governmental organisation, born out of the bigger Jubilee Campaigns from the turn of the millennium – Drop the Debt, Jubilee 2000 and Jubilee Debt Campaign – based in Grenada, but hoping to reach out to the wider English-speaking Caribbean islands. Due to our debt situation here, in the… Read more »

In the early 1990s, Professor Anthony Clare addressed a Dublin conference audience of some 300 people. It was an inspiring address and among the words that resonated were the following: “‘The elderly’ are not ‘them, out there’; ‘the elderly’ are us, writ large writ later.” Pithy and fundamentally true, it is a good starting point… Read more »

People are notoriously bad at assessing risk – we instinctively overestimate the likelihood of very scary events and underestimate the likelihood of familiar hazards. When this is combined with the power of gradual change, we end up collectively accepting situations that we would never rationally choose. The motorcar is the classic example: if we could… Read more »

Asked in a briefing, in February 2002, about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, entered into a poetic reverie that unintentionally described risk. In his answer he declared: … as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know… Read more »

Speeding Towards a New City There’s an old quip attributed to Henry Ford that no one was looking for the car to be invented; they just wanted faster horses. Even that is not true. What city-dwellers in the late 1800s had a problem with was manure. One early urban planner predicted that the biological waste… Read more »

Sadhbh O’Neill  WHEN DOES A HARM BECOME A CRIME? Social media users will no doubt be familiar with the increasingly familiar campaigns by cyclists in Dublin to highlight illegal parking on cycle-lanes or dangerous driving. Despite being chided by the Garda traffic bureau, the campaigners share videos and photographs that highlight non-compliance with traffic regulations… Read more »

Beth Duane INTRODUCTION Prison life in Ireland is not exempt from crime. While the common belief holds that a person receiving a custodial sentence will be stripped of opportunities to commit crime, research has shown that this is not always the case. Although little is known about the prevalence of crime in Irish prisons, violence… Read more »