Le DÓNAL Ó LIATHÁIN

Get Irish off life support and into real life, says JASON WALSH

‘Sinn Fein the Workers’ party’, Ireland’s ‘official’ republicans twisted in the wind, says JAMES HEARTFIELD reviewing the Lost Revolution

In the second article in his series on the Roman empire CHRIS GRAY examines the imperial oligarchy

forth begins a series of articles on Classical-era Rome by CHRIS GRAY with the plebeian fight for equality

The idea that animals have a ‘right’ to privacy is a trojan horse for even madder ideas, says TIMANDRA HARKNESS

Calls for Libya to stump-up to the relatives of people killed by the IRA are senseless, CONNAL PARR

A Tory government could, ironically, be good for the Irish language, says OWEN POLLEY

JAMES HEARTFIELD journeys through the poetry in motion of logistics

Just because you cannot programme a computer does not mean you cannot create, says JASON WALSH

Social Development Minister, Margaret Ritchie, today announced the commissioning of new public art, the ‘Bax of Fegs’, for Fountain Street in Belfast City Centre

A new book reveals how celebrities’ and human rights activists’ simple-minded moral posturing on Darfur made the conflict even worse says PHILIP HAMMOND

An ode to David Beckham’s foot is no more stupid than the office of poet laureate demands

We have to defend Lars Vilks because free speech matters but he’s a fool and his alleged would-be assassins arrested in Ireland are bumbling idiots, says FINBAR ROSATO in Sweden

25 years after giving up Greek, ANDREW CALCUTT explains why he is now a Latin lover

Social vampire and art critic Waldemar Januszak can now fondly remember the conflict in Ireland – but only because it’s over, says JAMES HEARTFIELD

As ‘lickable’ and beautiful as today’s information interfaces are, JASON WALSH longs for the Rodchenko-like simplicity of the modernist-inspired early Macintosh computers

forth editor JASON WALSH reporting on the ‘Irish-speaking elite’ in the CS Monitor

The Irish Film Board is badly run, supports lousy movies and costs the taxpayer money. Of course we need it, says NIALL KITSON

KEITH ANDERSON reviews the infamous Lock Keeper’s Inn just outside Belfast

Never mind that both artists are on Sony, the Rage Against the Machine campaign is more mean-spirited than radical

There’s more to art than Charles Saatchi, the Simon Cowell for middlebrows, says EDEL HORAN

PAULINE HADAWAY reports from Belfast, where the state’s cultural policy is bad for art, bad for politics and reveals a crisis in the political class

Students and staff at Irish universities need to toughen-up and start acting like adults, says a third level lecturer

James Heartfield reviews a book that puts the British new left’s failures on display, noting Ireland was a major source of paralysis for intellectuals

Patrick West says the SF revival mirrors our dark view of the world – and our place in it

Jason Walsh reviews a book that argues capitalism’s green critics are giving solace to a business class that no longer believes in itself

As the long shadow of potential budget cuts chills the arts, Northern creative bods needn’t kowtow to economists or anyone else. The arts can offer leadership and vision to politicians and others – not the other way round, says Caragh O’Donnell

Curator Finbar Rosato says that, though often interesting, the work of ‘outsider artists’ shows the art world’s desire to celebrate genius – and its inability to do so without cultivating a narrative of vulnerability

Irish republicans for British imperialism: Jason Walsh reviews ‘the Lost Revolution: A History of the OIRA and Workers Party’

A personal view of a monument to nothing, by Jason Walsh

A fashion shoot for an in-flight magazine taken at the Berlin Holocaust memorial was tastless and silly, but it was not anti-Semitic

Now that cuts are very much on the agenda the Irish arts scene is finally attempting to fight its corner – with rather less success than the trade unions, it has to be said, but it’s not public uninterest that has sealed the fate of culture funding, its the arts’ shilling for government that has done the damage.

Long-caricatured as resource destroying monsters clad in steel and glass, the skyscraper has never been viewed positively by Irish eyes. More’s the pity, says Jason Walsh

Reader responses to “The art of the state”

No to official culture, says Jason Walsh

The state’s recession-led art policy isn’t getting things right, says Lenny Antonelli – but money isn’t the only answer

In the first of a series of letters in which journalist Lenny Antonelli and forth editor Jason Walsh discuss urbanism, Antonelli says cars are a hazard to life in Dublin.

Has David Norris had enough of Georgian Dublin?

In this first in a series of articles on urbanism in Ireland, Jason Walsh notes that while Siptu is forging ahead with plans to replace Liberty Hall there are hundreds of buildings that should be knocked down first – starting with Trinity

Well-intentioned critics of African corruption do a disservice to Africans’ right to rule themselves

The North’s ‘re-imaging’ project took a surreal turn when working class loyalists prescribed something the middle class found hard to swallow, reports Daniel Jewesbury

Finbar Rosato says ‘eternal values’ are not all there is to art

Jason Walsh responds to Finbar Rosato, arguing that his desire for modernist values is not nostalgic

Finbar Rosato says contemporary art is freer than ever and ready for the public to engage with.

In the first of a series of letters in which curator Finbar Rosato and forth editor Jason Walsh discuss contemporary art, Walsh says criticising the art world doesn’t make him a philistine

Curator Finbar Rosato says art professionals should ignore the wordy manifestos of hack writers paid by the line

Recent reports that the art world has rediscovered aesthetics are encouraging but it’s too early to celebrate the death of empty art, says Jason Walsh

If Robert Ramsay has his way unionists will continue continue to slide into cultural politics after republicans, threatening to undermine their entire project and show up their leaders as ‘wee dafties’.

Review by Jason Walsh

By focusing on consumption, both sides in the debate over illegal file-sharing ignore the value of creative labour.

By Jason Walsh