Sunday Business Post – June 12 2011 ‘A member of parliament, a member of government, is concerned with social justice, with the creation of wealth and its distribution. As a judge one isn’t concerned with social justice as such, one is concerned with doing justice with the parties before him. It’s a different task.” In [...]

Interview in the Financial Times, May 20 2011 by David Gardner and John Murray Brown

Elaine Byrne, Sunday Business Post, 22 May 2011 ‘‘My elder brother’s gone, poetry is daunted; A stave of the barrel is smashed and the wall of learning broken’’ Garret was a political pioneer who didn’t always get it right, but made it his life’s work to improve political and social conditions in Ireland, writes Dr Elaine [...]

ANALYSIS: Two of Ireland’s elder statesmen – Declan Costello and Garret FitzGerald – share memories of their careers and Fine Gael’s first 75 years over dinner, writes Elaine Byrne in the Irish Times November 15 2008 THERE WAS something rather charming about the tickled way Declan Costello and Garret FitzGerald read aloud the ambitious draft [...]

“The constitution may for a time seem lost. The character of the country cannot be lost. The ministers of the Crown will find that it is not so easy to put down for ever an ancient and respectable nation by abilities, however great, and by power and corruption, however irresistible. Liberty may repair her golden [...]

Irish Times editoral November 17 2010 Was it for this? In memory of September 1913 by William Butler Yeats What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone? For men [...]

Artefacts from the State’s original senate offer a glimpse at a turbulent era in our history, explains former taoiseach Liam Cosgrave writes Elaine Byrne in the Irish Times 29 July 2008 “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of [...]

Annual General Michael Collins and President Arthur Griffith Ceremony Glasnevin Cemetery August 15 2010 I want to tell you a story today about two men born in the age of Parnell. Ireland after Parnell, in the dying years of the 1800s, was a grey place of paralysis. Politically stuck and fighting with itself. The opportunity [...]

Labour is primarily an urban party and must make inroads in rural constituencies if it wants to succeed, writes ELAINE BYRNE in the IRISH TIMES April 20 2010   EAMON GILMORE is good at oratory. His “One Ireland” rhetoric at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Galway paid tribute to the hope of an Ireland [...]

RENEWING THE REPUBLIC: This series has shown a thirst for political reform coupled with an uncertainty about how to achieve it, writes ELAINE BYRNE in the Irish Times April 3 2010   ACCOMPANYING THIS series has been an image of our national flag, contorted at the centre by a knot. The narrative embarked upon by [...]