Terry Dunne takes us back to look at the riotous popular culture behind the façade of Georgian Ireland and at how resistance was shaped by borrowing from festive life, folklore and recreation.
MAO 68!
This was not the first time barricades had dotted Parisian streets, but what was different about 1968 was the immediate international coverage of events. To students elsewhere, it showed the way. In Dublin, the ‘Internationalists’ of Trinity College Dublin, a small Maoist student body with influence beyond their numbers, disrupted the visit to the university by King Baudouin of Belgium.
Gombeen #15: Conor Feckin’ Skehane.
Later he stigmatised one half of service-users and simultaneously pitted them against the other half by blaming the homeless for “gaming the system” to get social housing
Avanti Popolo!
The experience of the Italian Communist Party has much to teach us, and we are of course very proud of that heritage, dating back to the resistance, but at the same time our world is now very different, and we must find our own responses to the problems of today.
BEEP BEEP!
The concept of public service broadcasting isn’t really a coherent blueprint for broadcasting practice. Rather is a rather vague concept based on a particular set of institutional arrangements and a particular coalition of class interests. In practical terms what it has meant is that the public interest has been defined largely by people drawn from the upper middle classes who operate in a subordinate relationship to the state.
Last Resorts.
“There’s a constant effort at balancing the interests. However there are fundamental contradictions in the interests of the tenants and the landlords. The landlord’s aim is to raise rent to make more money out of it and then the tenants aim is to have a secure place to live. This is playing out with slum landlords illegally evicting people using a high level of threat and violence, sending round heavies. RTB can’t really deal with that complex of a case or that level of force being applied by the landlord.”
Put It To The Testo.
There were splashes in the media last year about harm reduction advice being dispensed at Electric Picnic for the first time. Lazy hacks ushered a sigh of relief – here was a new element to add to well worn column inch filling codology about bog roll and fashionable wellies. Rashers Tierney looks at the need to encourage safer sessioning at festivals and chats to some pioneers in the field out foreign.
A HUNREAL listen so it is
We were frustrated at the polarised, un-analytical, stop watch style of broadcasting around the Repeal referendum. The interpretation of the broadcasting rules means that two sides are being pitted against each other in debates that don’t lend themselves to thoughtful, meaningful conversations.
Get Into The Groove.
They say the past is another country, but in the case of Ireland – it’s probably more like a parallel fecking looniverse. Rashers Tierney caught up with John Byrne to talk about the strange land that gave birth to the utterly fantastic Quare Groove compilation.
Acht Gaelige Anois.
Misneach was set up back in the sixties by socialist-republican Gaeilgeoir and modernist author Máirtín Ó Cadhain. It’s recently been revived by a group of Irish-language activists with a fiercely anti-capitalist bent. Tomás Lynch caught up with Misneach member Seanán Mac Aoidh to talk about the ructions over the Irish language Act in the North and all things Gaeilge.