Daft Property - Irish Property News

The elements that today might form a national culture – language, religion, nationalism – are no longer so readily identifiable here, where the effect of Tiger affluence was not individualism but conformism... THINGS ARE often studied only when they start to go wrong. The end of things is the moment when we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost. For instance, sociology emerged as a discipline in that era when society was no longer felt to fit like a glove. Perhaps the fairly recent development of Irish Studies on campuses is less a cause for celebration than a warning: that the identities which it sponsored were, in effect, being codified before their possible eclipse. Such fears have, of course assailed Irish people long before now. After the defeat at Kinsale, the poets of the 1600s proclaimed the collapse of Gaelic Ireland, but in lines of such throbbing vitality as to rebut that very thesis. A tradition lived on in the...

We're facing worst crisis in history of State... FORMER president Mary Robinson yesterday warned the Government that the country is in the grip of possibly the worst crisis in the history of the State. She bluntly told the country's leaders that a lack of a vision of ourselves "lies at the heart of the crises we face" and warned that it was vital that example now come from the top and that the vulnerable be protected. The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights yesterday became the first former president to deliver the General Michael Collins oration at Beal na mBlath in west Cork. Her speech centred on the scale of the crisis facing Ireland and how those in positions of power should deal with it. "Challenges of this magnitude demand not only detailed solutions but a comprehensive vision of what sort of society we want to see emerge from our current difficulties. "The likelihood is that, in the absence of a vision of our future which enjoys broad suppor...