Tag Archives: Ireland

Disaster Capitalism’s Catastrophic Success In Ireland … And America

It probably seems like I’m “a day late and a dollar short,” with a post about Ireland’s economic disaster days after the New York Times story about the high cost of austerity measures in Ireland echoed all Continue reading

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Movie review: Ondine

Neil Jordan and Colin Farrell have had similar careers, emerging from Ireland to hit it big in independent films, only to succumb to the blandishments and riches of Hollywood – and watch their careers suddenly torpedoed by involvement in weak, unmemorable work.

But both have rediscovered themselves when they return to smaller, more complex work – and such is the case with Ondine, their first collaboration. A witty, fanciful and touching film, Ondine is part myth, part fairy tale, part wistful romance. It’s quietly surprising in its own lovely way.

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‘The Outside Boy’: My Journey From Memoirist To First-Time Novelist

My editor once remarked that it was “interesting,” given my background in sales and publishing, that I chose to write about Irish gypsies in 1959 — not exactly the most commercial topic ever. But for me it seemed obvious: after writing my memoir, A Rip in Heaven, about my brother’s survival of a violent crime in which two of my cousins were raped and killed, I wanted to get as far away from writing about my life as possible. I’d had enough of ripping open the emotional scars of my childhood for other people’s examination. Or so I thought.

Writing about Ireland was a natural choice — I come from an American-Irish family. We were raised on a stern diet of Yeats, the Clancy Brothers, and skewed politics. I spent wonderful years living in Ireland, and then I moved to New York and found myself a west-coast Irishman to marry. When I started writing my novel The Outside Boy, I looked beyond the mainstream Irish tradition, and chose to set my story among Irish Travellers because I felt theirs was a community that was largely misrepresented. But I also chose them as my subject because they were so different from me, so foreign. I needed the comfort of that anonymity.

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The Biggest Loser: Sovereign Debt Edition

Last night, Micheal Ventrella was declared the winner of the 2010 season of The Biggest Loser. In celebration of such a respectable accomplishment, I propose we solve the global sovereign debt crisis in the same manner: good ‘ole fashion reality TV competition.

The season premier starts with each countries’ head of state taking to the scales (yes, that means every country, not just Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, the UK, and the US). Once the starting debt load is measured in each home country and the politician makes the requisite tear jerking regrets and promises to his/her citizens, the heads of state travel to a “ranch” where they are isolated to work off their sovereign debt.

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PaddyPower.com Offers Betting On Endangered Species, Next BP CEO In Wake Of Oil Spill

PaddyPower.com is cashing in on the recent oil spill disaster by offering gamblers the chance to place bets on environmental and corporate fallout in the wake of the Gulf oil spill.

The Ireland-based bookmaking website, whose “mission is to make ‘risk-based entertainment’ more accessible and fun,” has opened betting on a macabre environmental concern: which endangered species will become the first to perish because of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

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Transactions: May 17, 2010

Europe without Greece is like Main Street without Wall Street. Difficult to fathom, even if Goldman, Sachs & Co. has been naughty. For now, Greece can stay; but it skittered perilously close to getting voted off the Continent, mostly by Germany, which seems to control the votes. There’s a tangle of macroeconomics that makes relations between Greece and Germany fraught (including the threat of infecting Portugal, Spain, Ireland, the U.K.) and the euro-zone situation dire. The crisis is exacerbated by Europe’s uneven evolution, which remains more an economic than political construct, as if the United States consulted the Constitution for economic matters and the Articles of Confederation for politics. That said, the nub of the dispute comes down to matters no treaties, directives or decrees can bury: history, tradition, emotion, perception. In the end, Germany can’t understand why Greeks aren’t, well, German (Greeks disagree): orderly, tax paying, thrifty, export-oriented, resistant to inflationary temptations. And, even stranger, German intellectual tradition has long had deep affinities with the Greeks — unfortunately, the Greece of Pericles and Plato, not Papandreou and his minions. It’s like some alien race dropped into Greece, with a weakness for deficit spending and creative accounting.

How will this end? Who knows. Even if you succeed in comprehending Europe’s deepening economic woes (good luck), it’s devilishly more difficult to track deeper emotional currents of a Europe that, socially and culturally, has resisted amalgamation in Brussels’ technocratic melting pot. This raises an issue exposed by the financial crisis: the shaky apotheosis of economics or economic thinking. The crisis left the efficient-market hypothesis, with its engine of rational expectations, less a universal explanation for economic behavior (meaning, ipso facto, any behavior) and more, at best, a tendency. Bailouts and backlashes provoked panic, then frenzy, behavior the theory once defined out of existence. That, in turn, ushered in a remarkable conclusion: folks act for many reasons, rational, irrational, hinged, unhinged. Individuals, groups, societies are not necessarily consistent, logical, informed or coherent. They can, for instance, demand bankers lend while pelting them with rotten fruit. They can admire Greece but not Greeks. They can engage in bouts of world domination led by madmen.

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Multipolarism sans the EU Pole? The Geopolitics of Europe’s Economic Mess

Economists have been warning that the debt crisis engulfing Greece and the rest of the European Union (EU) where some economies have high government deficits and debt levels could affect the rest of the global economy, including that of the United States where many banks are heavily exposed to the debt of these economies.

That the threat of global financial contagion is real explains why President Barack Obama has been pressing European leaders to come-up with an effective response to the Greece’s huge debt problem that could spread into the PIIGS (Portugal; Italy; Ireland; Greece: Spain) economies and eventually to Great Britain and the rest of the EU, resulting in Global Financial Meltdown II.

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Molestation, Matthew 18, and Magnolia

Reports this past month of alleged sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests read like a sequel. Settings from the 2002 original have changed (Ireland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Brazil, Mexico, a deaf school in Wisconsin), but the script remains eerily similar: priest abuses child, and if there is a complaint, it is either ignored or addressed by transferring the priest to a new location. In either case, the result for the priest (and his victims) is the same: molestation, sodomy, rape. Church officials, it appears, repeatedly provided sexual vultures with a steady supply of young flesh.

Jesus of course spoke about children, and in Matthew 18 they are a primary focus in his discourse to the disciples: “If you do not become like children, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven … Whoever humbles oneself like a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven … Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me … ” (Matt 18:3-5).

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Dez Bryant’s Mother: Jeff Ireland Should Apologize To Me For Prostitute Question

Perhaps the most outrageous story to come out of the 2010 NFL Draft was the news that Miami Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland asked a prospective draftee whether his mother worked as a prostitute.

Dez Bryant, who was selected by the Dallas Cowboys in the first round, was the recipient of the question, and Ireland later apologized to him.

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Girlfriends’ Guide to Teenagers: School Bullies Hit Parents Where It Hurts

I’ve been working on this blog since the beginning of the week when 9 teenagers were finally indicted for various crimes that appear to have led to the suicide of Phoebe Prince. Phoebe, for those of you who don’t know, was a 15 year-old freshman and new student from Ireland at a middle class Massachusetts high school who made the mistake of having sex with a senior boy on the football team, thereby inspiring several month of harassment and bullying from his female friends.

One day in January, right before the big school dance, a car of these mean girls drove by Phoebe and hurled an energy drink can at her. She went home and hung herself in her closet. Worse, the mean girls continued the hatefest at the dance two days later.

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