Living with a disability can be a challenging and often isolating existence. Having worked as a Personal Assistant to people with disabilities for over 6 years, Hugo Bass calls the callousness of recent proposed cuts “A damning indictment of state detachment, administrative sloth and the voicelessness of the vulnerable.” You’ll need to have been living under a stone not to know that there have been massive reductions in funding for … Read More
Fight For Your Write: An Interview With Fighting Words.
Fighting Words is a creative writing centre based in the north inner city. The centre offers free creative writing workshops and courses to students of all ages. Mice Hell explores the project’s core ethos that “creative writing is an essential part of every child’s education. Why did you choose the name ‘Fighting words’ for the project and what does it mean? The name was chosen by Roddy Doyle. … Read More
Publishing Prose and Cons
With bookshop shelves over stocked with Harry Potter and fifty other shades of populist shite, Soso Wagwan roots through her rejection slips has and this ramble about how the publishers are stacked against her. Writing a book? Easy. Heading in to work extra early so you can print out 200 double-spaced pages on the sly? No bother. Quadruple-sellotaping them into an envelope from the pound shop that’s already starting … Read More
The Life of Reilly
Over the last 20 years, oversight for Ireland’s public health has rested in the hands of many prime advertisements of healthy lifestyles. P. Kolbe takes a look. Brian Cowen and Michael Noonan reigned in the 1990s – men whose figures were honed by life-long dedication to strenuous pint-swilling regimes. At the turn of the millennium Michael Martin provided a break from the tradition of clinical obesity as the primary qualification … Read More
Class Dismissed: Marking The Lock Out
Donal Fallon looks at how some plan to commemorate an event which pitted the forces of labour and capital against each other in an unprecedented and dramatic fashion. When the next issue of rabble returns from the printers, we will be well into 2013. While the country may be plastered with billboards encouraging you to bring your ‘Uncle Sam’ home for The Gathering next year, to many of us 2013 … Read More
A Gombeen-Nation once again
Above: Gombeen (gƊm ‘bi:n). Anglo-Irish. Usury. Chiefly attrib., as Gombeen-Man, a money-lender, usurer; so also gombeen-woman. Hence gom’beenism, the practice of borrowing or lending at usury. Mice provided the deadly ilo. The 19th-century term Gom’beenism, the practice of borrowing or lending at usury, is increasingly referenced in relation to Ireland’s domestic economic practices. Conor McCabe takes a look at the history of the Irish middleman and … Read More
So It Seems Tech Companies Are Eyeing Up Ireland?
Is it any wonder?
Ballroom of No Dance.
The 1935 Dancehall Act was passed in the atmosphere of racism and media hysteria which surrounded jazz. Originally intended to target this salacious newcomer it had a serious detrimental effect on the practice of traditional music in the countryside. Justin Cans takes a look at how it has had serious repercussions ever since. My first introduction to this bedevilment of the Irish Statue Book came around the year 2008, when … Read More