I’m currently reading José Saramago’s Seeing (a gift from a former student), which tells the story of how panic sets in among a city’s political classes after the vast bulk of the citizens cast a blank ballot in an election. It’s a great read, though I have to admit I thought the storyline a bit…
By Jane Suiter Writing in The Irish Times Eoin Daly of DCU argues that citizens should have access to non-sectarian public schools. While the argument is interesting in and of itself what appears to be at the heart of it is a kind of radical reform where, instead of the usual incrementalism typical of Irish…
By Dr Gemma Carney and Dr Clodagh Harris For most voters a sense of déjà vu follows the publication of the Moriarty Report. It appears that relations between the then FG Minister for Communications Michael Lowry and the winner of Ireland’s second mobile phone licence were at best inappropriate. The question again arises: what can be…
The editors and contributors behind polticalreform.ie have teamed with a large volunteer team of project managers, web designers and others to produce ReformCard a measurement tool to rank each party based on the quality of their policies on political reform. We hope this will prove a critical instrument in informing the election 2011 debate. It…
Beijing’s response to the award of the Nobel Peace Price to a leading Chinese dissident tells us something important about the country’s transition By Joern-Carsten Gottwald, Neil Collins and Andrew Cottey For the first time in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was awarded this…
This is a truncated version of the speech delivered by Dr Maurice Manning at the launch of The Houses of The Oireachtas on 25 November 2010 The Irish Parliament is one of the oldest continuously surviving parliaments in the world. Aside from its earliest years, its legitimacy has never been seriously questioned; it has provided…
Posted by Kenneth McDonagh, Dec 3rd 2010 One of the recurrent themes of the recent debates on political reform has been the lack of engagement and/or connection between ordinary citizens and the political system. The public ranges between rage and apathy when it comes to the question of how to influence politics. Calls for electoral…
Icelandic political scientist Silja Bara Omarsdottir writes about waking up as a newly elected representative to the country’s new constitutional assembly here. The assembly is a direct result of the Pots and Pans Revolution which took place in Iceland after the banking crisis tanked the country’s economy just over two years ago. Should we think…
In his weekly column in The Irish Times yesterday Stephen Collins argued cogently that radical political reform will be an urgent task of the new government Collins argues that it is now blindingly obvious that our multi-seat system of proportional representation played a big role in bringing us to where we are. “The system throws…
Many people seem to believe that a cross party consensus on a four-year economic plan is a good thing. While agreement that the budget needs to brought back towards balance is positive, demanding agreement on the policies necessary to get there is nonsense. What we need is an election and a government that has a…
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