Irish, EU & international politics & economics
By Damien Thomson. Just as always, they think we are not watching. Just as always, their voting record shows where they stand. Today an extremely important vote took place in the European Parliament – an objection to the EU’s publicly funded fossil fuel infrastructure projects – and I needn’t name the […]
By Lisbeth Latham. The unprecedented glacial melting, diminishing sea ice shelves, and extensive fires globally have fuelled growing existential angst around the looming climate catastrophe. This angst has been a major source of the emergence and growth of the climate strike movement globally which has seen millions of people drawn […]
By Damien Thomson. Anger is generally characterised as a negative emotion, but I’d beg to differ. Social movements need anger. Anger motivates. It unites. Last week in climate politics gives us a lot to be angry about. Monday At the United Nations headquarters in New York, the UN Climate Summit […]
By Sean Byers. The results of the recent elections in Ireland correspond to the fragmented and radically uncertain times we now inhabit. They reveal continuities in terms of the resilience of the dominant parties as well as changes in the overall composition and balance of political forces in both jurisdictions. […]
By Memet Uludag. Protest: Thursday June 6, 6pm at the Garden of Rembrance, Dublin. See the Facebook event here. Donald Trump is a threat to us all. His presidential campaign was based on racism against Mexicans – “build that wall!” He has tried to ban visitors and migrants from Muslim […]
By Damien Thomson. Around 3,000 students gathered outside government buildings in Dublin and towns across the country on Friday (May 24) to demand rapid and radical action on climate change. This is the second international strike co-ordinated by Fridays for Future – a global movement of climate protest. Speaking to […]
By Damien Thomson. On Tuesday 16 April, Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the Environment Committee in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, calling for “Cathedral Thinking” on climate action – a reference to the huge and immediate mobilisation of empathy, panic and money at the sight of the Notre […]
By Damien Thomson. Today is the day where hundreds of thousands of young people are expected to strike from school and take to the streets to demands immediate and radical climate action. Thousands have taken part in 37 different actions across Ireland, including an estimated 10,000 protesting outside the Dáil […]
By Vicky Cann. Do you know why the banks got their way after the financial crisis, while you shouldered the impacts of austerity? Or why our food will still be exposed to the dangerous pesticide glyphosate in the coming years? Or why the EU’s climate targets are much weaker than […]
By Damien Thomson. This is an eyewitness account of the UN Climate Conference COP24, held in Katowice, Poland, in December last year from the perspective of one of the 30,000 participants. All attempts will be taken to avoid acronyms of climate terms, or at least explain them, and I will […]