Danny Boy
by Daniel O'CarrollRSS 
Recent Posts
- National hero Donal Walsh loses battle with cancer - teen's optimism and courage inspired thousands
- Irish professor with multiple sclerosis Marie Fleming loses landmark right-to-die case in Irish Supreme Court
- Irish government cracks down on scam motorists - stamp out loopholes to scrub penalty points
- Terminally ill Irish teen Donal Walsh makes emotional plea to end youth suicide - VIDEO
- Drunk Irish teen charged with threatening to kill Guyanan president - 17-year-old told bodyguards he'd like to shoot Donald Ramotar
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The students are revolting again.
And while that may not be news to anyone, their latest spate of irateness may.
An unusually strongly-worded press release from the University College Cork (UCC) Student Union called Ireland's Minister for Trade, Employment and - ironically - Innovation "half baked" and "lackluster" in his approach to stemming the rising tide of graduate unemployment.
The Irish government looks bereft of easy answers to the increasingly complex third level fees issue.
With Ireland just beginning to peek its head out of a recession of staggering depth and proportions, the Government has some hard choices to make if it’s going to abide by its promise to not bring in third level fees, as Minister for Education Mary Coughlan made last week.
Ireland’s avowed economic mission for the twenty-first century is to become a so-called 'smart-economy', one based on its citizens' educational skills and abilities. This mission, though, hinges largely on its ability to produce a large crop of graduates with advanced degrees every year, and for this third level funding is requried.
Although it's hard to draw many positives from the release after a mere decade in jail of a sexual offender whose attack was so astoundingly violent that even the police service seem to remain in palpable fear, perhaps the one good thing to come out of it is that the world is now talking about - and laughing at - the decrepit state of the Irish justice system.
As one commenter did well to note on this website: "you double park you get a day in court , you kill someone you get a pat on the back." Of course that's a bit exaggerated, but there's more than a kernel of truth there.
The Irish justice system was built on the solid backbone of our own ancient Brehon law, and more recently from the English Common Law. Yet from these solid foundations, something began to crumble.
