The Housekeeper
Work is not a natural category. Every economic school from the Physiocrats to Kuznets drew the line between work and not-work somewhere different, and Ireland …
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Tagged: Political Literacy
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After the Isms
The coda to the Isms series. Twelve pieces gave the ideologies back their meanings. This one, clearly labelled as one writer's opinion, argues what comes …
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A Wealth Tax, Once Every Thirty Years
The Economist opposes a wealth tax while backing a broader inheritance tax. For the very rich those are the same tax on a different clock, …
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The Eleven Cookies
The grievance behind the fuel protests and the riots is real. The research says it is not personal poverty but a collective sense of lost …
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Joint force model: Europe + Canada, minus US (open planning document)
This is a working planning document, not a finished argument. It maps the bloc current capability, the 2036 target, and the calendar of decisions required …
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Eurenco: the small French company at the heart of European defence
Europe's munitions ceiling is set by a handful of energetic-chemistry plants, not by yards or steel. Eurenco is the state-controlled French company at the centre …
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The post-American defence bloc that has no name
A defence bloc has been built in stages since June 2025: the Canada-EU Security and Defence Partnership, the SAFE accession, Macron's forward deterrence with eight …
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Forward deterrence: what Macron actually said at Île-Longue
Macron's 2 March 2026 speech at the Île-Longue submarine base did four things at once: announced the first French nuclear arsenal expansion since 1992, stopped …
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Three years to house everyone: a working financing model
A working financial model for ending Irish modern homelessness in approximately three years: capital cost, financing terms, the transition profile, and the comparison with continuing …
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The shape of access: what 84,178 lobbying returns tell us about Irish public policy
84,178 returns across 11 years on the Irish lobbying register. The access patterns are visible in the data. Business lobbies dwarf labour and civil society. …
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Mapping the Irish right: what is forming, and what has been there all along
What 'the right' actually means in Irish life in 2026, mapped carefully: distinct strands, the recent drift, the electoral picture, structural drivers, and the empirical …
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The arithmetic of not building
Around €900 million flowed from the Irish State to private emergency-accommodation providers and HAP landlords in 2024, producing no permanent public asset. The same money …
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