Today sees the launch of a campaign by Anti-Deportation Ireland against the system of direct provision and the practice of deportation. Anti-Deportation Ireland (ADI) is a national network of activists, asylum seekers, refugees, community workers, trade unionists, and academics who have come together to campaign against forced deportation in Ireland, and for the abolition of the direct provision system.

The campaign features a detailed report on the human and economic costs of deportation, and testimonies from people who have lived in, or continue to exist in, the shadow of the system. The executive summary of the report, and some of these testimonies, are published below.

If we see universal child benefit being systematically dismantled in the next Budget, while we retain tax breaks that massively benefit people with the highest incomes, then the fundamental values underpinning Ireland's budgetary policy need to be questioned. By Nat O'Connor.

Despite the helpful reminder from Joseph Stiglitz that "Austerity has almost never worked", the Government has decided to cut further and deeper in the next Budget, with reports that Minister Noonan will again prefer two-thirds spending cuts combined with one third tax increases.

There are no easy choices left for the Government, as it seeks to close the deficit through €3.5 billion of measures. While it is necessary to close the deficit, there are a couple of significant questions to be asked that provide important context for any consideration of cutting child benefit.

Forty-six years ago (in 1966) three High Court judges adjudicated in a case where a child, born to unmarried parents, was adopted. Subsequently the natural parents married each other and made an application to have their child returned to them, after it was found that the adoption order concerning their child had been invalid.

By this time the child was aged 17 months and had bonded securely with his/her adopted parents and, aside from that, concerns were raised about the capacity of the natural mother to parent the child adequately.

Nevertheless, the court found: “It would be impossible to give effect to the parents’ (constitutional) rights and duty of education, if they are not given custody of the child”, and the only circumstances in which this right and duty could be supplanted were exceptional cases “where the parents for physical or moral reasons fail in their duty towards their children”. The court ordered the return of the child to the natural parents.

Over the next few weeks, when you hear commentators asking – “Will the Government cut child benefit?” – just remember: they're already cutting it. By Michael Taft.

According to leaks, the Government is apparently ‘considering’ proposals from a Department of Social Protection working group to reform child benefit payments. There is something profoundly manipulative about this debate. Only one part has been leaked – the overall cut. It would have been just as easy to leak the entire set of proposals.  Partial leaks usually suggest there is an agenda at work.  Given that parts of the proposals are in the public debate, the Department should now just publish the entire report so we can read, judge for ourselves and be part of the ‘consideration’.

That said, the media reports that the Government is considering cutting child benefit are not correct. The Government is already intending to cut child benefit. They announced it last year, started it last year and intend to continue doing it next year. So the Government is not considering cutting child benefit. It is considering cutting more child benefit.

It’s rarely easy to be openly pro-choice in Ireland. This country has no shortage of people willing to tell you how you’re a murderer, selfish, disgusting, a baby-killer. How you’re heartless. How you should be ashamed of yourself.

The last major pro-choice demo I was at, two years ago, was a counter-demonstration to the March for Life. A couple of hundred of us, thousands of anti-choice marchers led by Youth Defence who didn’t hesitate to get in our faces, shout abuse at us, call us things I’m not going to repeat here. Being openly pro-choice can feel like running a gauntlet where you’re never sure what’ll happen next. So it’s not surprising that I was more than a little bit nervous before Saturday’s March for Choice. That nervousness, that apprehension, made what happened next even more incredible than I could have imagined.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute's budgetary proposals would remove the need for cuts in public services and social protection, increase investment, and keep more people at work than under the Government’s plans – and all this while maintaining the same pace of deficit reduction. By Michael Taft.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute, ICTU’s think-tank, has looked into the budgetary future and finds there is a better way of doing things. They have utilised all the tools of economic analysis to show that what they call ‘Plan B’ is a far better way of doing business than what the Government intends.  Their budgetary proposals would remove the need for cuts in public services and social protection, increase investment, and keep more people at work than under the Government’s plans – and all this while maintaining the same pace of deficit reduction. It doesn’t make grandiose claims (billions in soaking the rich, hundreds of thousands more at work, etc.). It merely shows that there is an alternative that is better. This is an analysis and a programme that all progressives – in civil society, trade unions, political parties (including the Labour Party) – can rally around, while providing that commodity we need most – hope.

Video: Mary Norris speaks at the launch of the Mary Raftery Fund for Investigative Journalism in Dublin on September 26. Mrs Norris recalls her first meeting with Mary Raftery during Raftery's investigation into child abuse at Magdeline laundries and other church-run institutions for the documentary 'Suffer little children '. Norris traveled from Knocknagoshel in Kerry for today's launch.

The sapping of the community’s skill base, and the deep social problems that go with that, have been the legacy of the Celtic Tiger for Finglas South and West. By Jack Copley.

The neighbourhoods of Finglas South and Finglas West form a large triangle, lying to the west of the Finglas Road. Cycling up through the middle of the estate you realise it lies on a hill. When you reach the line of shops on Cardiffsbridge Road you can look over your shoulder and see the Dublin Mountains as they rise from the sea in the east and then vanish behind a row of houses in the west.

Houses are identical bar varied coatings of paint. Large grassy spaces divide estates and an enormous modern church towers over the community. The view of the mountains is one of the few features that distinguishes Finglas from most other working class Dublin suburbs.

Finglas South and West (FSW) comprises council estates built from the late 1950s to the 1970s, originally to house people cleared from Dublin’s inner-city tenements. The picture painted of FSW during the Celtic Tiger boom was one of a neighbourhood plagued by murderers, robbers and drug dealers leeching from Ireland’s newfound wealth, products of moral corruption and shoddy parenting. It would be rare to see an article with more than a passing mention of the underlying hardships faced by the local people.