“It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car. Two missiles from an American jet killed them all –… Read more »

The social partnership process emerged in Ireland at a time of crisis and has been closely associated with recovery and transformation in the Irish social economy.  The names of the six social partnership programmes of the past sixteen years suggest some of key concerns  of the time  – recovery, progress, work , competitiveness, partnership, prosperity,… Read more »

Thomas L. Muinzer INTRODUCTION Ireland stands at an important historical moment. We live in an era where the world is endeavouring at last to get to grips with what philosopher Noam Chomsky, recently deceased physicist Stephen Hawking, and many others have described as one of the greatest problems facing humanity, that is, anthropogenic (human driven)… Read more »

Tim Chapman INTRODUCTION The core value of the common good, which sustains community and justice, is being eroded in modern society.1 Globalisation has provided many material comforts, but resulted in an underlying sense of insecurity and risk.2 Many people have lost the experience of solidarity with others that community and religion offered in the past. They feel… Read more »

Sheelah Connolly INTRODUCTION What constitutes a good healthcare system? Opinions differ, but the World Health Organisation (WHO) has simply defined it as one that: “delivers quality services to all people, when and where they need them.”1 This definition is closely aligned to the much-discussed concept of universal healthcare. While the term is somewhat ambiguous and often… Read more »

Dalma Fabian INTRODUCTION Rates of homelessness are rising in almost all EU countries with a 150% increase in Germany from 2014 to 2016, a 20% rise in the number of people in emergency shelters in Spain over the same period, and an 8% increase in Denmark between 2015 and 2017. In the Netherlands 4,000 children… Read more »

When Pope Francis met with a number of survivors of clerical abuse during his visit to Ireland in August 2018, the impact was profound. The expectations of those he met were minimal — that they would sit and listen, and he would leave after 30 minutes. Instead, the meeting went on for an hour-and-a-half and… Read more »

An interview with literature scholar Marie Mianowski Economic analysis has no monopoly on how to examine economic history. The death of the Celtic Tiger is a phenomenon that can be represented in graphs, in tables, in charts, and also in prose. Irish novelists have taken to the page to account for what life was like on… Read more »

Henry Silke Dr Henry Silke serves as Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Limerick’s School of English, Irish and Communication and directs the school’s MA and Graduate Diploma in Journalism. Ten years on from the property and banking crash many of the same issues still set the news agenda. Property continues to make the… Read more »

Sadhbh O’Neill Sadhbh O’Neill is a PhD candidate and Government of Ireland Scholar based at the School of Politics and International Relations, UCD. Introduction Climate policy falls into that strange category of things government does not want to do, but must do. There are no (or few) votes in it. Doing it properly entails more… Read more »