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Back Issues / 2005
Our Country Right and Wrong
“Migrant worker” is a new term in our public discourse. As a term, it is very useful and also very comforting: useful, because it describes a large number of foreign workers, many of whom come from the new EU accession countries; comforting, because it helps us avoid the term “immigrant”, with the implication that such people are here to stay and that our government agencies, and even we ourselves, ought to pay close attention to how they are treated, paid and housed.
Our Culture and Society
Two currents now run through Irish life, one of which is well reflected in media commentary and another that is normally overlooked. The regular tone of much media commentary is a result of the Irish intellectual elite’s somewhat late conversion to anti-clericalism in the Continental tradition.
The Future of Europe
On a grey October day in 2004, when the Draft European Constitution was something rumoured, but not much discussed, and when its acceptance in every European Union country, except Britain, was regarded as almost inevitable, I went into the European Commission Office on Dawson Street, in the heart of Dublin, and asked for a copy of the Revised Draft. Nobody could give me any clear information. I asked when the Draft would be available in English and was told to expect it in February of this year. I asked if a copy could be sent to me upon publication. This was promised. My name and address were written into a notebook, which looked very informal and did not inspire confidence. Eleven months later, I was still waiting.
In Sickness and In Health
The National Advisory Committee on Palliative Care issued a report in 2001. The government accepted it, but very few of its recommendations have been acted upon. Ireland, which led the field in palliative care ten years ago, is now falling behind. The dying are, of course, the most economically unproductive of all of us. The inevitability of all of us being amongst them, sooner or later, does not seem to give any sense of urgency to their needs, though “their” will becomes “ours”, because, as a newspaper series once reminded us, “mortality is eventually 100%.”
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