Most of the non-European immigrants we get in Ireland are already "Westernised" in that vague sense that they wish to step aboard the property express and have all the goodies often denied them in their place of origin. I used to work in a refugee center and irrespective of nationality; Cameroonian, Congolese, Iranian, Egyptian, Muslim/Christian or whatever, it's the base economic determinants - the need for a job and a roof over their head which obliterate any differences that arises...

Much of the great rural to urban migrations which have produced the shanty towns and ghetto complexes in the regions of the 'undeveloped' South have occurred, in the main, over the past thirty years and are related to capital interests working their way through the international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank etc) to effect domestic policy changes conducive to their own interests. There is nothing inherently wrong with this if you subscribe to the notion that open borders and a liberalized...

The unconscious has a timeless, pulsatile function and if you were to ask what is a prevailing cause of crisis in this troubled region I would say it is the Israeli mind itself - a mind which needs to be expunged of its darknesses.

For the entire process of Holocaust remembrance, of continually revisiting the events both in their public and private lives has obviously had an incalculably strong - and deleterious impact. There are painful, recurring modes of renewing this compact with...

'Marxism', in so far as that term refers to what the man actually wrote was an unstoppable success; he completely upended the accepted hierarchy of the day, laying the seeds for almost all of the advances in working rights, pay and entitlements we take for granted today.

I'd say the aristocracy were flabbergasted when they read 'Das Kapital', not merely the ideas, but the tone in which they were presented, it oozed a jaw-dropping self-assurance. All of this 'dictatorship of the proletariat'...

The victims of terrorist strikes in London and New York are just as innocent as all those whose lives have been claimed in the Middle East and beyond by the often cold calculus of geopolitics. The CIA have long had a term to describe the unintended consequences of it's covert operations - it's called 'blowback' and it's principle applies just as readily to innocent peoples impacted negatively by American foreign policy decisions.

Confining ourselves to the Middle East and only to recent...