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Monthly Archives: October 2006

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Bartimaeus and world development

For the fainthearted . . .

The Kampuchea crisis in 1979 marked the beginning of my interest in world development. An advertisement on the back of New Statesman prompted me to send £5 from my student grant to assist the aid effort.

The world was, of course, very simple in the eyes of a teenager in the first year at the London School of Economics. There were the people who were right and the people who were wrong – and being right or wrong depended on whether or not I agreed with them.

Solving problems was …

Time to be nasty

For the fainthearted . . .

There is an American comedy film called ‘National Lampoon’s European Vacation’; in it an American family travel around Europe, spreading a trail of chaos and destruction wherever they go. In each city they visit they cause some grave misfortune to an English tourist played by Eric Idle, and each time the Englishman apologises, how careless of him to be in the way of their car when they ran him over, and so on.

Idle’s character is a caricature of Englishness, but it makes the point that there was a tradition …

Who are the losers?

For the fainthearted . . .

The Irish government has followed their British counterparts in banning the free entrance to the labour market to Romanian and Bulgarian workers when their countries enter the European Union next year.

Who does this benefit? It’s intended to protect workers in the home labour markets, but the permit system that will be applied to the Romanians and the Bulgarians is no different than that which currently applies to the Chinese in Ireland.

No-one knows how many Chinese are in Ireland, estimates vary, some say as many as 60,000. Many of …

Meeting the fundamentalists

For the fainthearted . . .

Attending a secondary school run by fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, I remember times when as an ignorant teenager I felt I had to stand up for science. I remember being taken to task by a teacher for telling younger boys that I believed in evolution.

Things have swung so much now that I wonder if it was worth struggling to argue for science when people like Richard Dawkins were waiting in the wings to tell me and others like me that our faith in God was naïve nonsense.

Dawkins has become …

Ethos, ethics committees and economics

For the fainthearted . . .

At the diocesan synod of Dublin and Glendalough last week, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin Dr John Neill, expressed serious concern about the future of the hospital at Tallaght – the only general hospital in the state under Protestant management. The Irish government’s decision to locate its new children’s hospital at a Roman Catholic hospital threatens the long-term viability of the children’s hospital at Tallaght, and, if the children’s hospital is lost, the whole Tallaght hospital complex faces the prospect of being down-graded to a district hospital.

To …

Wealth, health and Jesus

For the fainthearted . . .

Sermon at Saint Matthias’ Church on Sunday, 22nd October 2006

” . . . whoever wants to be first must be slave of all” Mark 10:44

Most of us will probably remember things we were told time and time again when we were young; things remain in our head a long time after we heard them.One of the things I remember being told frequently was, ‘€œGod looks after those who look after themselves’. I’m not sure why God even came into the conversation, we weren’t religious people; but the message …

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