Where were the Credit Ratings Agencies?

Poor old Michael Fish. When the sad day eventually arrives and the erstwhile BBC weatherman is whisked away to the great big spirit in the sky, passing through all those clouds, whose formations he spent so many long hours analysing, our Mick will be instantly recalled as 'the weatherman who couldn't even see a hurricane coming'. Fish's failure, in 1987, to foresee what would be the worst storm to hit Britain for nearly 300 years will forever taint the thousands upon thousands of reasonably accurate predictions he made before and after his infamous faux pas.

What would Dickens think?

Two hundred years after his birth, it is an opportune time to reflect on how someone like Charles Dickens would look upon the current economic and social malaises in Irish society. Interestingly, Ireland featured very little in Dickens’s works during his lifetime, beyond the occasional stereotypical depictions in his works of stock Irish characters of the era. This is not to say that he held anti-Irish prejudices, but rather that he was a creature of his era and his attention was focused mainly on the plight of the urban poor in the growing industrial centres of England.

A perfect storm

Poor old Michael Fish. When the sad day eventually arrives and the erstwhile BBC weatherman is whisked away to the great big spirit in the sky, passing through all those clouds, whose formations he spent so many long hours analysing, our Mick will be instantly recalled as ‘the weatherman who couldn’t even see a hurricane coming’. Fish’s failure, in 1987, to foresee what would be the worst storm to hit Britain for nearly 300 years will forever taint the thousands upon thousands of reasonably accurate predictions he made before and after his infamous faux pas.

Neoliberal fairytales

It is a grand little country after all - where our austerity preaching politicians are feted as celebrities and people like Lucinda Creighton and Paschal Donohue come across as angels, such is their innocence and horror if there is a mention of ideology  - or in their case, codology.  The name of the whole game here is spin - because spin works and spin is politics.

We don't need no regulation

Is there a need for greater regulation of how we express ourselves on the internet? Ironically, some of the best reasons for thinking that there isn’t are to be found in the sorts of pro-regulation articles which have recently appeared in the ‘traditional media’. (See, for a perfect example, Eamon Delaney’s latest offering on the Sunday Independent’s website here)

History is not on Europe's side

Despite daily talk of European disunity, and the Czech declaration last night that it won't join a fiscal compact, we are (yet) living through the strongest phase of the European “concert system” since 1815.

Parallels with past, weaker iterations of such a system of what was (then) nominal co-operation and (mainly) diplomatic summit politics are intriguing. In each time, great powers have clubbed together (“in concert”) to constrain hegemony and protect the status quo and have ultimately failed.

Taking exception to exceptionalism

Anyone who has been exposed to the soap-opera-cum-cage-match that is American politics will know that there is little upon which both Democrats and Republicans can agree. “American exceptionalism” is, well, an exception to this rule. Put simply (and usually hyperbolically) this is the idea that the US is the “greatest nation in the history of the Earth”; the exact words used by Mitt Romney in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition last December.

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