The almost certain victory of Syriza in the Greek elections on January 25th marks the first victory of what can be called a 'new left' party in Europe, and carries strong echoes of what happened in Latin America a little over a decade ago. Latin America was the region that incubated neo-liberalism, firstly after the Chilean military coup in 1973 and then through the structural adjustment imposed upon (and willingly accepted by,  it must be said) most of the region's countries in the wake of the debt crisis in the early 1980s, before exporting it to the US and Europe...

After years of delay, the Government has finally published its Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill, giving statutory foundation to the institutional arrangements to move Ireland to substantial decarbonisation by 2050. The most promising aspect of this bill is its title, implying government action on climate change but also acknowledging that such action involves changing our form of development, moving towards what it calls 'low carbon development'. But will the institutional framework to be established under this bill deliver such a radically new model of development?

The institutional framework to be established, as laid out in the bill, is...

In his response to the murders of the Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris this week, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, made a veiled allusion to what a decade ago was a much discussed framing of the issues that lie behind these murders. Kerry said that the murders 'are part of a larger confrontation, not between civilizations - no - but between civilization itself and those who are opposed to a civilised world.' It brought to mind Samuel P Huntington's 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in which the veteran US political scientist posited a fundamental clash of values between...

So, at long last, a new political party struggles to be born, offering 'a new outlook and a new vision', 'a party that changes the way we do politics'. Its leading light, Lucinda Creighton, believes 'the old political paradigms of left and right to be completely redundant now' and refuses to situate her party on this familiar political spectrum. Meanwhile in an Irish Times interview published on January 2nd, Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin has said his party wants to position itself in 2015 'as the only centrist party' with a focus on education, health, equality and political reform.

In...