Going Nuclear Is (Still) Not The Answer

The massive costs and long construction times associated with nuclear power means that every euro invested delays decarbonisation. Since the crisis we face is urgent, the wise approach is to prioritise the transitions that are cheapest to build and fastest to deploy.

Drugs: Continuing to Fight a Lost War

If a climate of fear dominates most public discussion of drug policy, it is often associated with, or justified, by a climate of moral disapproval – drugs are bad, therefore we must eliminate them, we cannot be seen to tolerate them in any way. The war on drugs must continue and any dissenting voices must be suppressed.  

Active transport

Choose Your Weapon: Cars or Fists?

Causing the death of a pedestrian or cyclist will continue to be treated as manslaughter but the statutory response to careless and dangerous driving resulting in serious injury is not served by meagre fines for motorists who do not even have a driving ban imposed. Lifetime driving disqualifications must be on the table of sanctions as a driver who has caused injury has visibly demonstrated an inability to safely operate a motor vehicle

Climate Crisis – Thank God it’s Them Instead of You?

We are not yet feeling the worst impacts of climate change. However, this summer’s wetter than normal weather has already played havoc with the agricultural industry, reducing growth and impacting harvesting. Imagine the impact of more widespread flooding, or the compounding impact of several years of climate induced poor yields. Our reliance on a very narrow range of environmental conditions and our failure to build up our environmental resilience is incredibly risky.

Where are Travellers meant to live?

Travellers are overrepresented in homelessness emergency accommodation and also comprise part of the ‘hidden homeless’ in Ireland; people who are living in precarious or overcrowded housing. Traveller families with children are often left lingering in emergency family hubs for far longer than families from the settled community before being offered homes. When they are offered homes, these are often inadequate or ill-suited to their needs. Travellers who try to get tenancies in private rented accommodation face discrimination and have applications rejected.

Getting Real About Active Transport and Young People

Research suggests that even switching to cycling or walking one day a week can have significant consequences for our personal carbon footprint and our collective emissions. Developing tailored Irish studies that draw out the kind of emissions reductions that are achieved through school-based active transport initiatives would be an important element of the argument that could encourage local councils to commit to real evidence-based policy.

Welfare Reports, Feral Youth, and Child Imprisonment

Considering how we begin to end violence in society, Allegra McLeod, from University of Chicago, urges us to “expand our understanding of violence beyond individualized disorder and the immediate scene of interpersonal harm” and unearth its political and economic roots. This can be difficult when a victim has experienced extreme violence and long-lasting harm. But the ambition of criminal justice systems should be the tempering of violence in society and not just meting out more violence in response to the initial offense. Louk Hulsman, a Dutch criminologist, warns that we create a counter-reality when we only understand an individual in the context of their offense, completely isolated from “his environment, his friends, his family, the material substratum of his world.”

A city fit for a child

It is a terrible indictment of a city’s infrastructure that I consider myself lucky to be hit by a car in the specific way I was. My incident was not recorded, and neither are many such cases (many of which have much more severe outcomes), which masks the level of danger inherent in cycling or walking through the city.  The stats that are recorded highlight the problems we have on our roads. So far this year in Ireland 22 pedestrians and one cyclist have been killed. These figures are an outrage.

Homelessness and “it’s complicated”

The reasons for turning down one or more offers of social housing are the concern of the homeless person or family involved, and this is not why the homelessness situation is “complicated”. It is complicated because of the reticence to solve it, by automatically placing homeless people in [actual] social homes for fear of a cascade effect where there is a rush of people declaring themselves homeless. This is the anxiety expressed in the 2017 Welfare cheats… campaign – the unfounded fear that the people at the bottom of society are taking advantage of us all, when our real fear is that we might some day be those people

Towards a Green Neutrality

In conversation on this topic, it becomes clear that most Irish people view neutrality not as a refusal to participate in the struggle for justice, but as a positive commitment to participate in certain ways. That means we don’t build an army capable of joining an invasion force. But that doesn’t stop us from building an army well suited to peacekeeping duties.