Sticks and Stones

Whether politics is an art or a science may intrigue the academics, but for many of us in Northern Ireland it is a deeply dispiriting and often quite ugly spectacle.  Let me balance that by saying unequivocally that our leaders deserve a great deal of respect and...

Babel or Pentecost: Where do you want to be?

There was a lot of talk recently about who should speak Irish and, being an Irish speaker it set me thinking. I asked myself, as I regularly do: ‘what does it say in the Bible?’ Now, there’s nothing specifically on Irish in the Bible but two passages about language...

Watch Your Language!

It has been noted that economics is an ‘imperialist beast, claiming the relevance of its general approach … to a very wide range of human activities’.1 Thus economic models and language have come to predominate in institutions previously organised in different...