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Council to get €2.6m for site once valued at €28m
Yet another controversy over its land disposals has hit Wicklow County Council following a decision by Councillors to hand over a valuable town-centre site in Bray to developer, Paddy McKillen junior....
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Oprah No
Before she declined febrile suggestions that she run the US presidency on the grounds that she does not “have the DNA for it” Oprah Winfrey, the nation’s mother was attracting a great deal of serious...
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Where commuting can take all day
My commute to work is a 40-minute walk. I get up at around 7am, get ready for work and leave my house at around 8am. I usually stop to get a coffee. Sometimes I have to queue, sometimes I don’t. My...
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Lessons from Nuremberg
I have for the last month been based in Eastern Europe, lecturing and contributing to the Anglo American University in Prague. The University has been very nice to me in light of the bedraggled and...
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€140m to clean up one of Ireland’s 450 contaminated sites
Silvermines, which the government spent €11m remediating in the 1990s, was back in the news in May 2017 as three cows were found dead of lead poisoning. A new inter-agency group involving the HSE,...
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Eschatology, or the study of the end of times
Eschatology, or the study of the end of times, is at least as old as the written word. The concept spans many of the world’s major religions, usually referring to some future day of judgement or...
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Nama, the drama
Nama was inevitably going to be controversial. Set up to acquire loans from the Irish banks that had recklessly provided the finance for an almighty property boom and needing to be rescued when the...
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It’s Time For Leaving Cert Reform
It’s that time of year again. The CAO applications deadline has just passed and the mock exams are about to begin for almost 60,000 sixth year students. It’s also the season for commentary on the...
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Closure through Disclosure
It is not a question of whether there was a Garda smear campaign against Sergeant Maurice McCabe. Rather, it is a matter of who planned and orchestrated it. For the first time since his prolonged agony...
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Wicklow Manager bouncing Bray demolition
Village last month reported that Wicklow County Council has agreed to sell a prime town-centre site in Bray to developer Paddy McKillen’s Navybrook Ltd for just €2.6m. The deal is contingent on...
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Publish Chief Justice’s report on garda’s suicide
From our March 2018 edition. If a tree falls in an empty forest does it make a sound: if a gun shot is fired in a building can it not be heard, especially when people are in and near that building?...
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Rugby’s dirty secret
Come clean, John McClean. John McClean had the power to make or break a schoolboy’s dreams of playing rugby for his country. As a coach in Terenure College for almost 30 years, and then head of the...
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Fine Male
Fiona McLoughlin Healy persists, where Catherine Noone left off in drawing specific attention to sexist bullying – in Kildare County Council and the Kildare and Wicklow Educational Training Board By...
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Lone Woulfe
The Attorney-General, Séamus Woulfe, failed to disclose a “false” and “misleading” order made by the former Manager of Wicklow County Council (WCC) when he compiled a report for the Government on the...
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Sinn feigns principle
The Westminster oath declares: “I … swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to Law. So help me God”....
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The man from MI5 'asked us to execute' Haughey
Last September Village described how the UK’s intelligence services conducted a near-decade-long smear campaign during the 1970s designed to undermine Charles Haughey. It failed at every turn and...
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Relegate Italy and promote Georgia
As the 2018 Six Nations enters the final two rounds, the sense of excitement around this year’s tournament gathers pace. It has been a very successful tournament so far, with high-scoring games full...
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The dark side of the media
The British media is aghast at revelations that a man called David Floyd was a Soviet spy. Floyd worked for the Foreign Office in the 1950s and was assigned to a string of Eastern European embassies....
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Dumb greens and unions
One of the things historians may dwell on is how the key December 2017 and February 2018 eu drafts of the Brexit agreement came to take the forms they did. It is all the more important since the inept...
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John Imrie, MI5’s Flasher-General
Village has learnt that John L.L. Imrie, formerly of MI5 and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), died last summer without a whisper of his passing reaching the ears of the press. Imrie had the unique...
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