Recent Articles

Micheál Martin || I reflected on the conversation, on Seamus’s enduring wisdom, and on the centrality of his parting question. When are we going to realise we have to learn to share this place? Obviously, the towering achievement of the Good Friday Agreement provides the context and the structure for answering it, but that didn’t engage sufficiently with the spirit of the question.

Jane Ohlmeyer || How, after a few hot weeks in 1947, Radcliffe’s incompetence left ‘a continent for better or worse divided’. How Radcliffe then scuttled back to England ‘afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot’.1

John FitzGerald || The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement provided for the possibility of a referendum in Northern Ireland on Irish unification at some future date. Some, especially in Northern Ireland, would like to trigger such a referendum over the coming decade.

Seán Ó Riain Ireland’s economic and social model is a mixed bag. There is clearly greater overall prosperity in recent decades, reflected in doubled employment, rising employment rates, and increased incomes. But there are also significant problems, reflected in high levels of market and disposable income inequality, a range of major deficits in infrastructure and services, and a widespread uneasiness about the basis of that prosperity.

David Begg The Industrial Development Authority (IDA) is probably Ireland’s most successful state agency. It has been the cornerstone of industrial policy for over fifty years and is rightly proud of its success in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). It might come as a surprise to the board of the IDA, and an embarrassment to the Department of Finance, to learn that the former was once regarded by the latter as ‘a gang of crack-pot socialist planners’.

Peadar Kirby ‘Imagine that the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism’. The situation we now find ourselves in throughout the world is precisely analogous to this, with our societies and even our personal lives profoundly reshaped by a doctrine that most have never heard of and many economists even deny exists, namely neoliberalism.

Michael Taft || A central feature of the Irish economy stems from its historical inability to develop a strong indigenous market sector. This article argues that workplace democracy is indispensable in creating a strong domestic enterprise base, privileging workers to do what native capital has been unable to.

Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain Recalling the acclaimed seventeenth-century priest-poet George Herbert, Seamus Heaney, the beloved Irish Nobel Laureate, summed up the achievement of Peter Steele, a priest- and poet-friend, when he wrote to Steele, ‘George Herbet would be proud of you’.1 A fellow Jesuit, Steele was a lifelong friend of mine. When he passed away, I wrote his obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald2 and reprinted it in Portraits: Popes, Family, and Friends.3 The obituary ended with a brief reference to his friendship with Heaney. At the time I had no idea of its rich significance for those…