Housing ownership in Ireland has bestowed an enduring set of values. But if there is any lesson from 100 years of Irish housing it is that housing policy can diminish, or it can reinforce, social and economic inequality.

  2021 marks the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It is an apt moment to take stock of the history of policies pursued in the State since then, focusing particularly on the areas that comprise the core of our work in the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. We begin with a… Read more »

The central idea of MMT is that countries that issue their own currency are not financially constrained. This is because a government in control of its currency can simply ‘print’ new money to finance its spending. In today’s world, printing money does not mean opening up the printing presses, but rather is about creating money electronically at the click of a mouse. In its purest form, the central bank simply credits or increases the bank account of the government, which is then free to spend.

It does not work to replace ‘paying your debts’ with ‘repairing the harm’, then. Drawing on the work of penal theorist Antony Duff, we suggest the metaphor of “fulfilling a civic obligation” as an alternative tool to guide our responses to crime. Duff argues that, done very differently, “criminal punishment could and should be inclusionary, as something we can do, not to a ‘them’ who are implicitly excluded from the (law-abiding) community of citizens, but to ourselves as full, if imperfect, members of that community.”[15]

Theology turns out to have something significant to say to our young student and to society more widely. It can help us discover that there are ways to get at the injustice of an indebted society that predate Marx and his many descendants.

The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), is also known as the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat. On Earth, there are over 2,200 rodent species comprising about 40 per cent of all mammal species. What’s one rat?

Debt creates an interdependent relationship between the creditor and the debtor, until the alienation of the latter from the former. Like an addiction, it can lead to alienation from one’s own body.

It is not only when debt is contracted that the ethical dimension is involved, it is throughout the repayment process. The debtor and the lender are not equal. It is not, as we say in economics, a zero sum game. The creditor expects his money to be profitable and to earn interest.

“I tried to raise the point of who was Edward Colston, and why are these people saying the statue needs to come down? I was just floored, basically told to shut up, and that these people protesting were just ignorant and stupid. So, I just sat there crying silently and just feeling ostracised and disappointed because the other students were also not educated. So that’s where some of this began.”

Debt is where dreams go to die. We put aside ‘unnecessary’ things like our hopes of becoming an artist or musician. There are monthly repayments to be made, and so we need to work, and work, until (if we are fortunate) we can retire and enjoy a few years of glorious unproductivity before death.