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Keywords: Irish

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Elegy for Peter Porter

    • John Kinsella
    • 05 June 2024

    An elegy doesn’t need to be written straight after a death... and maybe one’s own death catches up before the obituary we write is published. It might be something like re-arranging modernism into structurally sound lines, or discussing the context of metaphors in poems about London and friendship.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Terry Pratchett and the nuclear energy debate

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 05 June 2024

    Since Peter Dutton has reignited the appetite for the dream of unlimited energy from atom-splitting, we have to think about the risks again. Is it more dangerous to keep burning coal and gas and oil and boil the planet than to have a few Chernobyls or Windscales? How do we balance such risks?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Why do referendums bite the dust?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 March 2024
    3 Comments

    Much like Australia's recent Indigenous Voice Referendum, the recent Irish referendum sought to change constitutional perspectives on family and marriage met with overwhelming defeat. What does this reveal about the relationship between public sentiment and the process of enacting constitutional changes?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Stepping up for St Pat's

    • Sheila Ngoc Pham
    • 14 March 2024
    1 Comment

    Watching your child perform and be judged is a sure way to make you feel ‘all the feels’. Yet this is what happens every month throughout Australia at feis — Irish dancing competitions. Welcome to the world of competitive Irish dancing, which reaches peak visibility around this time of year because of St Patrick’s Day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We don't know ourselves: A personal history of Ireland

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 07 July 2023
    1 Comment

    Comparing perspectives from different generations of Irish writers, Fintan O'Toole explores the weight of Ireland's 'lovely past', its unaddressed traumas, and their impact on the present. Addressing themes of change, politics, and religion, his narrative offers an unflinching exploration of the Emerald Isle's history.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The constant remaking of a nation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 August 2022
    4 Comments

    Few Australians of Irish descent will now be familiar with this history and the experience that accompanied it. They would see themselves as simply Australian. But the emphasis on social justice, the recognition of the value of community, and the concern for people who are marginal that are communicated through Catholic schools and the sympathy with the underdog owe much to the Irish heritage.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    'Career' Brexiteers fail the Edmund Burke test

    • Max Atkinson
    • 02 August 2019
    17 Comments

    Now that the UK is in the final phase of leaving the Union we should ask, before the bell tolls, how much this misadventure — or folie de grandeur — was due to politicians putting their interests above those of the nation, ignoring democratic theory and long-settled constitutional practice.

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  • RELIGION

    John Molony and his Catholicism

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 March 2019
    2 Comments

    'John was Catholic to his bootstraps: Catholic, Irish Australian, a Labor man and a Carlton supporter. He'd have loved the inaugural speech delivered in the Victorian Parliament last month by the new Labor member for Hawthorn.' — Frank Brennan, Great Hall University House, Australian National University, 1 March 2019.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ireland's Brexit troubles

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 02 November 2018
    4 Comments

    It is the ordinary people — the pensioners on trollies, the sick interminably waiting on ever-increasing lists, the patients being treated in understaffed hospitals — who will truly suffer from Brexit's immediate body shocks to an already frail healthcare system decimated by years of austerity funding cuts.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mending man

    • Julie Perrin
    • 02 November 2018
    14 Comments

    Padraig leads the Corrymeela community in the north of Ireland. It is a place committed to healing the social, religious and political divisions that exist in Northern Ireland. Corrymeela is an ancient Irish word. Padraig says they understood it meant 'hill of harmony' but recently they've discovered it is more like 'the lumpy crossing place'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Oz

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 July 2018
    3 Comments

    The same sense of grievance and outrage that drove Jack and his rebels 500 years ago has sent Trump to the White House, propelled the United Kingdom out of the European Union, resurrected the poisonous 'Irish question' and legitimised Senator Pauline Hanson. She, with Cade-like empty bravado, claims to be for the 'battlers'.

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  • RELIGION

    Do pro-life Australians need a new approach?

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 04 June 2018
    56 Comments

    The result in Ireland is a timely reminder to political and/or church leaders in Australia who like to use Irish Catholic heritage as a way to defend their conservative views. On nearly all issues that have been debated by Australian Catholics against their religious obligations, the motherland is, clearly, no longer the source of moral legitimacy.

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