In many ways Ireland punches above its weight when it comes to dance music. Struggling against restrictive licensing laws, exorbitant rents, harsh drug policies and a general ignorance of electronic music and clubbing by those in officialdom, the scene is still kicking. However, you could go out every weekend and never see a woman djing.
Beggars chats to two collectives changing all of that.
One of our more backwards and archaic laws gets the puntastic treatment by Emare.
While Luas Cross City work continues apace in Dublin, there was a noticeable absence of Luas trams at times. The just settled industrial dispute between tram drivers and their employer grew proper bitter at times, yet as Donal Fallon finds it’s certainly not the first major strike involving Dublin’s tram drivers.
While much has changed in recent decades, some things haven’t – there was nothing new about some of the discourse around the recent Luas dispute, depicting workers as overfed and underworked.
If anything would surprise Dubliners of old about the current dispute, it is perhaps the fact there are tramlines at all. When the last Dublin United Tramways Company route closed in July 1949 (the No.8 to Dalkey, for any pub quiz aficionados) many believed they were waving goodbye to a form of public transport for ever.
In the Sunday Independent, one writer made it clear that “I am sorry for the demise of the trams, but as a motorist I just cannot weep for them. They had become an incorrigible block to modern traffic, holding always, as they did, the middle of the road…Yet, the trams are dead, and it is time for them to lie down.” By the 1940s, the tram seemed a relic of the past.
In 2009, WikiLeaks released a confidential document listing Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank’s exposure to mega loans. The bank had loaned billions to a golden circle of major shareholders and attempted to manipulate its share price. The state broadcaster, RUV, was gagged from reporting the WikiLeaks exposé. As a result a radical initiative called the International Modern Media Institute received unanimous support in parliament. Sean Finnan spoke to Smári McCarthy, one of … Read More
For a few years through the gloom of the recession there was a hope that the potential existed to bring something of the vivacity of Berlin to Dublin. Martin Leen believes you can kiss that hope goodbye as the new rental realities are killing art spaces.
Most of us are familiar with RTÉ’s bias, be it through cosying up to government quarters, lambasting Sinn Fein, or constant under reporting of anti-water charge protests. Seamus L Moore takes a look at their role and service as the national public broadcaster and sets out to answer the age old question of why is RTÉ so shite?
Our chief messer in ink, Mickey Bananas had this rather cutting take on Brexit up Norn Iron for #rabble12.
Investigative journalist Gemma O’Doherty has garnered a reputation as a tenacious old-school reporter. She’s currently championing the case of Mary Boyle, a six-year-old Donegal girl missing since 1977. Rashers Tierney caught up with O’Doherty after her appearance at the Journalism In Crisis conference in the University Of Limerick back in April.
When our Obersturmführer for property developers, Simon Coveney designated the former Glass Bottle plant a Strategic Development Zone, there was plenty of celebratory hoo ha in the media for the 3,000 homes promised as part of the scheme. However far from being an answer to the capital’s housing problem, a little digging leads Rashers Tierney to find this SDZ represents a brewing triumvirate of social exclusion, vulture funds and tech … Read More
The protracted pantomime over government formation has somewhat overshadowed the gravity of what occurred in February’s general election. With regime support at historic lows, Oireachtas Retort looks at how some middle ground commentators continue to dismiss the movement against Irish Water. As soon as ballot boxes opened in February it quickly became clear that voters had delivered a kick in the teeth that neither politicians nor their media priests had … Read More