Today: Sunday, March 21, 2010

Ronit Lentin

Article list

In-direct provision

Last update: 10:41 | 03.03.10

I suppose we knew most of it: that direct provision hostels for asylum seekers – which I see as refugee holding camps – are totally degrading, and that the ‘comfort money’ allowance paid to asylum seekers is insufficient for even the

read more

Identity - the great debate

Last update: 14:31 | 18.02.10

In recent months, France has been engaged in a debate about its national identity, not surprisingly initiated by the Minister for Immigration Éric Besson. So lively has it grown that it’s even prompted Prime Minister François Fillon to announce

read more

The post-budget blues

Last update: 20:39 | 17.12.09

After weeks of speculation, the Minister for Finance delivered his verdict – cutting expenditure all around him, targeting public sector workers, allowances for children and the unemployed, medical card holders and other recipients of welfare.

read more

Who speaks for whom?

Last update: 09:22 | 05.11.09

Since the onset of the recession and the demise of the NCCRI, not to mention the budget cuts affecting the Equality Authority (EA) and the Irish Commission on Human Rights, no one has been speaking much about racism. Most Irish people feel they have other priorities

read more

A taste of the Middle East

Last update: 04:20 | 22.10.09

I have been in Ireland long enough to have experienced the huge ethnic culinary revolution which swept the country in recent decades. Quite apart from the obvious growth in posh restaurants during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ era, and their current demise,

read more

‘We’ belong; ‘You’ decide?

Last update: 02:43 | 17.09.09

A lot has been written about the pros and cons of the Lisbon Treaty. I confess I have not read it in its entirety, but nothing of what I did read has made me change my mind about a ‘no’ vote.

read more

Israelis must cry freedom!

Last update: 13:29 | 03.09.09

Barack Obama is being hailed for renewing the Middle East ‘peace process’. A process it is, yet peace it certainly isn’t. If they ever get around to it, negotiations are set to open between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority,

read more

No sanctity of the family here

Last update: 17:27 | 06.08.09

In 1969 I got married in Israel to an Irish citizen. We sent a notarised translation of our marriage cert and my birth certificate to the Department of Justice in Dublin, and I received my passport and naturalisation papers by return of post before I ever set

read more

France’s veiled threat

Last update: 12:01 | 09.07.09

Five years after the French parliament passed a law forbidding children from wearing the headscarf or any other “conspicuous” religious symbol in schools (read as forbidding Muslim girls from wearing the veil in public schools), the French government

read more

A legacy of intolerance

Last update: 16:07 | 25.06.09

When post-conflict Northern Ireland was dubbed the ‘race hate capital of Europe’ by the BBC in 2004, my colleague Robbie McVeigh made the point that it was wrong to say, as many journalists did, that racism escalated simply because Protestants and

read more

Not one for the ‘Irish way’

Last update: 12:23 | 28.05.09

Last week I attended the humanist funeral of David Marcus, Ireland’s foremost literary editor, who supported scores of writers by publishing their short stories, novels and poems through his work as literary editor at the Irish

read more

Opposing our sacred cows

Last update: 00:31 | 07.05.09

On the eve of Israel’s 61st Independence Day last week, the country’s police arrested six Israeli Jewish feminist political activists – members of New Profile, the movement for the civil-isation of Israeli society, including a 70-year-old woman

read more

Israel must be accountable

Last update: 18:00 | 29.01.09

On 19 January I attended the Holocaust lecture in Trinity College. The lecturer, Dr Nicholas Stargardt of Oxford University, spoke about Jewish children hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I happened to sit next to a stalwart member of the Dublin Jewish

read more

2009: New year, new war

Last update: 05:31 | 15.01.09

What a start for the New Year! On 27 December, the Israeli Defence Forces launched an attack of unprecedented scale on the Gaza Strip. According to the Israeli government, the attack was in response to unyielding Palestinian rocket and mortar fire into Israel

read more