Right-to-housing referendum would not lay a single brick
Sometimes it seems that the classical notion of the separation of powers in our democracy is slowly liquefying into a veritable soup of hopeless inability to run the country. Montesquieu, an 18th-century French political philosopher, saw powers of government or the political authority of the state as properly divided into three channels – legislative, executive […]
How did Barrett’s tiny National Party amass €400,000 in gold?
After all the controversy about Renault money and RTÉ, it was surprising that “fiat currency” should now enter the political arena at the instance of Justin Barrett, the ceannaire of the National Party. Apparently the extreme-right micro-party had stashed away gold bars with a face value of more than €400,000 in what he described as a “party vault” […]
State must not fill vacuum left by religion with its own doctrines
A point is coming where there is going to be a real national debate on the role of the State in relation to education in an increasingly secular Ireland. One regularly hears mutterings of discontent on social media concerning the function of the Government and individual departments in determining schools’ educational curricula in the areas […]
Major cost control questions across State’s transport plans
The National Transport Authority (NTA) bought 134 brand new all-electric buses in June 2022 for use in Dublin. There are 100 new double-decker buses and 34 single-deck electric buses in storage around the city, but none are in use because the NTA failed to get planning permission for the charging infrastructure to enable them to […]
Inefficient, expensive, exasperating TV licence regime needs overhaul
The issue of TV licence fees has cropped up again in circumstances where it cannot be kicked down the political road in the way it has been over the last fifteen years. Opinion polls suggest that the public is now increasingly determined to withhold payment of the licence fee as a protest at recent events. […]
Do we want citizens arresting one another for incitement to hatred?
In 1997, the Oireachtas enacted a far-reaching statute to codify and reform the criminal law, much of which was based on judge-made common law stretching back over the centuries. The statute was entitled the Criminal Law Act, 1997. One thing done in that Act was to abolish the ancient legal distinctions between what were termed felonies […]