Mary Harney may be gone from the health ministry but many of the myths (and bad policies) that the PDs propagated about the health system remain. In the first of a series of articles drawing out the neoliberal myths that have structured health policy, Sara Burke starts with some of the most basic.
Top of the myth list is the fundamental assumption that public healthcare is bad and private is good. In fact, if you are very sick in the Irish health system you will have to avail of the public health system and once you can get into it, you are better off within the public system.
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Radical analyses of the Irish and European debt crisis can benefit from engagement with some mainstream (or even right-wing) analyses – there is much to be learned there, and sometimes a surprising amount of common ground. However, where the mainstream falls down is in its misunderstanding (wilful or not) of the politics of the way in which the debt crisis is being managed – it does not recognise (or chooses not to recognise) the instrumentality of the debt response for the furtherance of corporate power and wealth. In other words, what good does it do, and for whom? By Andy Storey.
The election campaign has now begun in earnest, and the performers have shuffled on stage and begun their well-rehearsed hymn to hopeychange. But Patrick Barry finds them woefully out of tune.
Writing about statistics in the 1950s, Darrell Huff noted: "There is something fascinating about [them]. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." As it was, so it ever will be, as Mary Gilmartin finds.
With an election only weeks away, five ministers have announced their retirement (with healthy pensions) from political life. But what level of destruction have they left in their wake? Justin Frewen assesses Mary Harney's reign of terror.
Corporation tax cuts don't lead to prosperity - 
