Tue21052013
Last update05:54:53 PM GMT
Last week former Taoiseach and President of IFSC Ireland, John Bruton, said that the banking industry needed "to focus on ethics rather than regulation". As someone who strongly supports the idea of ethical codes and a more central role for ethics in business, I found this remark and the casual way it was accepted unhelpful on many levels. Ethics are not an alternative to regulation; rather regulation is needed to support ethical behaviour.
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"It's Capitalism Stupid" is the tag line for a festival organised by the Colletivo Prezzemolo -researchers and workers at the European Institute University (EUI) - in Florence, Italy which is running from 3 - 12 May, 2013. The festival is deliberately scheduled to take place at the same time and in contradistinction to the annual "State of the Union" conference at the EUI which brings together "leading academics, policy makers" and other members of the establishment to discuss matters EU from the insider perspective.
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FC Barcelona is one of the most successful football clubs in the world and, although like most of the big football clubs around the world. Unlike almost all of the major Premiership clubs elsewhere in Europe, FC Barcelona is not owned by an oligarch or even by a cabal of oligarchs, is owned by its 175,000 members who each pay an annual membership fee of around €200. It is a not-for-profit organisation; nobody gets paid dividends, although the players are among the richest in the world. BY Vincent Browne.
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The exchequer deficit in Ireland was €1.6 billion at the beginning of 2008. The exchequer deficit at the start of 2013 was €15 billion. Over the corresponding five years from 2008-2012 inclusive, the total 'savings' by way of public sector pay cutbacks, public spending cutbacks and tax increases amounts to €24.4 billion. By Dr. Tom O'Connor of Cork Institute of Technology
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Laura Agustín is renowned for her ground-breaking research, writing and advocacy on migration, sex work and trafficking. Her writing is available on her blog The Naked Anthropologist and in her highly acclaimed book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. Writing frequently about the sex workers she has worked with, she has attracted controversy from those who would rather see sex work and prostitution completely abolished. Interview with Stephanie Lord. Dr Laura Agustín will be speaking in the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies in UCD, Dublin 4 on Thursday April 4, from 4-6.30pm.
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Is a euro in a Cypriot bank, locked down by withdrawal limits and capital controls, the same as a euro in an Irish or French bank? Is a euro sitting in, say, a payroll account in Laiki with a balance of more than €100,000 (and subject to an unspecified “haircut” on Thursday) the same an “Irish euro”?
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On Wednesday, March 20, UCD Women’s Studies hosts renowned sociologist, Prof. Hill Collins for a public lecture entitled ‘Where do we go from here? Intersectionality and Social Justice’. Prof. Hill Collins specialises in critical race theory and feminist theory, and is perhaps best known for her work on intersectionality, that is, the notion that people are often subject to multiple and mutually reinforcing disadvantages based on gender, race, or class, for instance. Below, Prof. Hill Collins discusses some of the key themes of her work.
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The idea, now enshrined in our Constitution, that there is an equal right to life of the unborn child and of the mother is nonsense. By Vincent Browne.
A new person, a girl, has come into the lives of people I know. She has not yet been named but the attachment to her is very real. Her grandfather can hardly wait for a time to play with her and to make her laugh. But there is a problem at present.
She isn’t born yet and the thought of anything happening to her, at this vulnerable stage of her life, is awful to anybody close to the family.
The idea that she might be aborted is unthinkable to them. This beautiful (there is already a photograph of her on display), lovable child having her life deliberately terminated when it has hardly begun seems an abomination.
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The controversy over horse DNA found in beef burgers should be put it in its proper context - that of a society characterised by quite serious material inequality. By Alistair Fraser.
Horseburger. There’s no shortage of commentary. What else is there to say? We know it highlights important issues for us to consider about the food processing industry and its powers and vulnerabilities. We know it says a lot about the sort of food economy with which we interact on a daily basis. And it forces us to dwell upon the idea of eating horse meat - and indeed meat from other animals we might actually be happy enough to consume. All of these issues have been aptly and effectively discussed this past week.
Somewhat lost in the debate, however, has been attention to the sort of social processes that generate demand for these ever-cheaper processed foodstuffs. Without question, the supply-side of the equation has been tackled: competition drives so-called innovation, new ways of producing food are created, new products conjured up, and new regulatory practices emerge that may or may not do enough to ensure food is safe and/or correctly labelled, etc. But what about the demand-side? There are two connected issues here. Let me take the more personal one first.
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Micheál Martin is using events in the North as part of his strategy to revive Fianna Fáil’s electoral fortunes in the South. By Eoin Ó Broin.
The award for opportunist of the week must surely go to Micheál Martin. His opinion piece in last Wednesday’s Irish News was a timely reminder of Fianna Fáil’s cynical approach to both the peace process and to politics.
For weeks Belfast city centre has been brought to a standstill by illegal loyalist blockades. Night after night the same protestors have returned to their own neighbourhoods and engaged in running battles with the PSNI, causing real disruption to their own communities.
In more recent nights these riots have turned into organised attacks on nationalist homes in the Short Strand.
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Why has Pat Rabbitte failed to act on the issue of concentration of media ownership? By Vincent Browne.
Last year, the businessman Denis O'Brien addressed the proper role of the owner/controller of a media enterprise, saying that the owner/controller should act "at an appropriate distance from editorial matters" and should be aware of "the responsibility that rests with media owners not to interfere with editorial content”.
On Friday 11 January, the Irish Times published an interview with James Osborne, the former chairman of Independent News & Media (INM), which O'Brien now controls. Osborne is quoted as saying that, on 14 April last year, a Saturday, O'Brien phoned him and demanded that an article about him be withdrawn from the following day's Sunday Independent.
Osborne said he responded: "No, that's not what I'm going to do." And he did not do that. He recalled in the interview that the article turned out to be "pretty innocuous". It was about the biggest borrowers with Anglo Irish Bank, O'Brien being among them.
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