Features

Time to confront the neo-liberal agenda for education

THE current economic crisis has resulted in savage education cuts and more are threatened. These are socially and economically short-sighted as well as being unjust. What is particularly nauseating about this attack is the targeting of many disadvantaged students. All of this has been accompanied by a campaign of propaganda against teachers and other frontline public servants, resulting in a penal tax called the pension levy.

Photo: A LOT TO LEARN: Education requires adequate financial investment

Referendum Watch ... Referendum Watch ... Referendum Watch ...

Jason O'Mahony is a funny guy. Don't take my word for it check out his website www.jasonomahony.ie. He is a former member of the Progressive Democrats with a fetish for Evel Knievel and Terence Trent D'Arby, but don't let any of that put you off. The funniest thing on his site is, The Spoofer's (Improved) Guide to the Lisbon Treaty. Underwhelmed by the Yes side during the last referendum campaign, O'Mahony decided to take matters into his own hands.

Torture, ill-treatment, inhuman and degrading treatment - Britain's role, past and present

BRITISH MINISTERS have again been forced to deny continuing allegations of collusion in the torture of detainees in the 'War on Terror' after their own parliamentary committee on human rights admitted it could not establish the truth because information was being deliberately withheld by their own government. In a joint article in the Sunday Telegraph on 8 August, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Alan Johnson stated that there was "no truth" in the suggestion that it was official policy to "collude in, solicit or directly participate in abuses of prisoners".

Turf cutters tell EU to sod off

TURF CUTTING was always part of Ireland's indigenous way of life. It was like thatching or hurling, part of the ethos of people who, over generations, perfected the art of self-sufficiency. ELLA O'DWYER looks at the here and now of working on the bog, the people on the cutting edge in the field, and the EU bureaucracy threatening to finish the practice for good.

Photo: TURF: EU Habitats Directive makes no sense when it comes down to someone who just wants to cut for domestic fuel for their own home

Disaster developing in Sri Lanka's concentration camps

A humanitarian catastrophe has been escalating over the past three months in the internment camps in which 285,000 Tamil civilians have been imprisoned in Tamil Eelam in the north of the Sri Lankan state. Even some liberal Western media outlets have begun referring to these camps - heavily guarded by the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and ringed by razor wire - by their accurate name: concentration camps. Now the already disastrous conditions for the camps' prisoners, which include an estimated 55,000 children, are being exacerbated by heavy rains which have caused major flooding.

THE JULIA CARNEY COLUMN

The Brits have always loved the notion of their 'special relationship' with the United States. Since they've never really got over the fact that they're more or less a third rate world power these days the notion that they're taken seriously in Washington allows them to pretend they're still playing with the big boys. But what do the Americans make of their British allies and in particular, what do they make of the role they're playing fighting side by side in Afghanistan and Iraq?

More than a game By Gael Gan Náire

LADS I am disappointed in ye. Only three men turned up at Gills last Sunday to join the Vigilance Committee and one of them was scuttered, courtesy of my old friend Jim Birch, I would not be at all surprised, after a carvery lunch in the Auld Triangle.

Remembering the Past: 19 prisoners escape from Portlaoise

ONE of the most successful and spectacular escapes during the present struggle for freedom was the mass breakout by 19 republican prisoners from Portlaoise Prison in the summer of 1974. In November 1973, ten days after the dramatic escape of three republicans by helicopter from Mountjoy Jail, all republican prisoners in Mountjoy and the Curragh Camp were moved to Portlaoise Prison. During the early months of 1974, with over 120 republicans from north and south of the border imprisoned in Portlaoise, the prisoners began planning an escape.

Photo: PORTLAOISE: The breakout was an acute embarrassment for the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government

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