Drums beat deeply all around me as people congregate for The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope. Face-painted and costume-clad performers run through carefully crafted renditions, eager children hold large replica tombstones above their heads bearing the names of the community projects they are defending. Julian Brophy reports from The Spectacle of Defiance.
It’s a Dublin Thing.
A gritty, urban poetry shines through Products of the Environment, a compilation album on Working Class Records. Track after track documents growing up with little in the way of options and realities dominated by drug abuse, crime and paranoia. Accompanying videos capture blighted estates full of hooded youth, pushed to the margins by the city’s economic apartheid. The sort of places the rest of us just cycle through.
{Cops} Corrupt, thick and incompetent?
Do you remember when the cops threatened a Shell to Sea campaigner they had arrested with rape, creating a short lived national scandal? Well since the media hype died down, a cover-up has been in operation right from Justice Minister Alan Shatter to the Sindo to the Garda Ombudsman (GSOC). The GSOC has been leaking material to it’s pet crime correspondents. What’s amazing here is the how incompetent they are. … Read More