I know we’re all very busy, but I do think the Minister for Justice passing a law to invent a carve out for the police’s requirement to have Judicial oversight of their use of Facial Recognition of public places was worth a bit of attention. www.thegist.ie/the-gist-hum...

Video: Protecting human rights on a shared island: Insights from ARINS ARINS seminar explores human rights, migration, and cooperation across Ireland, highlighting challenges and opportunities, 22nd June 2026 www.ria.ie/2026/06/22/p...

In his ignorant belligerance Big Jim has basically brought down the criminal justice system. Never thought I'd find myself on the same side as solicitors but this is about equity in access to justice and can impact any of us. This is about €40m while the government gifts over €681m to hospitality.

JUST PUBLISHED! Great to see my commentary published in Critical Social Policy today: "The resilience trap: Deepening the 'risk shift' in social policy via the crisis and resilience fund". journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... More in the following posts:

In December 2022, it felt like Scotland was leading the way in advancing rights for #LGBTQ+ people. It had just passed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have allowed trans people to self-declare to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate. https://ow.ly/l7aY50ZfOtH

The new EU migration pact has been coming into force across Europe for two weeks now, bringing greater uncertainty and slowing down already complicated systems, and leaving asylum seekers suspended in a dangerous limbo.

The UK Statistics Authority has written to Kemi Badenoch today, following our fact check of her inaccurate claim that the total welfare bill is now higher than income tax receipts “for the first time ever”. We hope she will correct the record soon.

At @euhealthgov.bsky.social webinar tomorrow lunchtime, we are delighted to welcome Dr Chloé Berut, who'll be presenting work on #digitalhealth and #EUhealthpolicy. For more information, and to register: events.teams.microsoft.com/event/d11cf8...

The destruction of UK universities, and especially of the arts and humanities, continues. Let‘s see if a new PM does anything differently - I won‘t hold my breath.

...to learn how to think like a lawyer. You read statutes and cases so that you know how to read statutes and cases. You'll likely be doing the job for 40 or 50 years. Almost nothing you learn at university will remain unchanged, so you need to be able to digest the changes without undue trouble.

To expand on my theme slightly, people often misunderstand the purpose of a law degree. It is, emphatically, *not* to learn "The Law." That changes daily. By the time my first degree was over, Irish property law (as an example) had been overhauled beyond recognition. What a law degree is for is...

stopping research will not, in fact, do anything at all for "the classroom" creating tenure-line faculty positions, reducing class sizes, and funding libraries will each do a lot, though

Hell yeah! Thousands of cases adjourned over legal aid withdrawals share.google/cccCS1Do5Waj...

The introduction of a flat-fee system for legal aid representation will effectively dismantle a system which, while not perfect in many respects, functions well when it comes to safeguarding the right to effective legal representation and the right to a fair trial. @garygannontd.bsky.social

Very happy to see this out on perceptions of welfare deservingness for different categories of migrants, together with @lorenzopiccoli.bsky.social and Samir Negash @fggaleiden.bsky.social, open access in EPSR:

A chairde, I have a 💖book coming out💖 on 11th August!! It’s called Access to Justice for Minority Language Communities and you can pre order it! And I have a discount code! For 50% off!! www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/...

🚨🚨Great intervention by the #Pope Leo XIV slamming European governments for their “indifference” to the plight of #migrants who will be on the right side of history. 🧵 www.politico.eu/article/pope...

As I wrote at the time of the Ballymena pogroms, I'm old enough to remember when the LVF attacked the home of disabled child because he was insuficciently Protestant. I'm old enough to remember this because it happened in 2024. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

Per most recent figures, net migration to NI *over the past 22 years* has been ~62,000 people. Only 3% of Northern Ireland’s population currently belong to an ethnic minority. Pogroms in Belfast (as with Ballymena last year) are just gutter-level "One Is One Too Many" racism, and nothing else.

Thousands have turned out for an Anti-Racism rally in Belfast city centre, organised by United Against Racism and supported by Trade Unions

“The mobs burning out Sudanese families in east Belfast are the inheritors of a tradition that the British state has never fully confronted, because doing so would require confronting its own role in creating and sustaining it.”

Really happy that mine and Keith Crome’s article on #AI and Plagiarism has been published in @futurehumanities.bsky.social in open access. We argue that focus on policing students conduct misses the more profound challenge to our assessments from #GenAI onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Context for Belfast riots

Immigration into NI is tiny, and after three years of race riots, it hardly looks attractive to newcomers. But the idea that this is anything other than a pronounced problem for Loyalism and that "cross-community rioting" will emerge is nuts. The lads with flags in Dublin aren't from the Falls.

Revolutionary British artist David Hockney dies aged 88

It was a pleasure to host Prof Sacha Garben (@collegeofeurope.bsky.social), Rebecca Gorman (INOU) and Prof Pauline Cullen (@maynoothuniversity.ie) to discuss differing perspectives on the EU’s ability to act on substantive equality @maynoothlaw.bsky.social on Tuesday

This is exactly it. The work is the point.

"The nostalgia does the work the economics ought to be doing" is a killer line

Only 1 week to go until this hybrid two day conference: 'Socioeconomic Rights: Past, Present and Future'. 📅 16-17 June 2026 📍 Room G32, Liberty Building, LS3 1DB The event is free, but please register for a place👇 tinyurl.com/nhcc94ve

Data matters "Because without changing how we manage housing data in Ireland, we will continue to run around in circles, getting nowhere closer to filling all the homes in the country and, crucially, ensuring everyone has a home" @judesherry.bsky.social & my latest in The Journal #DerelictIreland

The School of Law and Criminology is delighted to launch the Postgraduate Scholarship once again for the 2026-27 academic year. This scholarship awards €2,000, which will be deducted from the recipient's course fees. For full details and how to apply please see: tinyurl.com/solcscholars...

A conference is taking place in Dublin on Thursday 11th to highlight a MASSIVE threat to Irish nature. Judicial Reviews have been a critical means for local communities to challenge wrongful, damaging environmental decisions, but they're going to be severely restricted by legislative changes.

Debate on RTÉ radio about migration has not once mentioned that of the three places with “return hubs” we are planning to send failed asylum claimants to, two are repressive dictatorships and one is a failed state run by competing warlords.

🎙️ New episode of the In_equality Podcast: „Who Pays the Price of Parenthood?“ @pietervanhuysse.bsky.social, Gabriele Spilker, and @mbusemeyer.bsky.social discuss welfare states, and inequalities between parents and non-parents. 🎧 tune in now: t1p.de/bt6j0 @uni-konstanz.de

"Deportations are not managing migration. What is managing migration is planning and thinking about how migrants will need access to housing or hospital, or education for their children" 👏👏👏

It's not possible for White people to experience anti-White racism because racism is a term to describe a history & present of structural, institutionalised oppression of Black people within a constructed White supremacy. White people are affected by prejudice & discrimination of many types.

CJEU, EU citizenship II New judgment: Member States (in this case Ireland) can investigate alleged fraud by a non-EU citizen as regards free movement even after that person obtains that country's nationality curia.europa.eu/site/jcms/d2...

CJEU, EU citizenship I New judgment: non-EU parent of an EU citizen child cannot be compelled to live in another Member State curia.europa.eu/site/jcms/d2...

Ned Coleman-Fountain has co-authored a chapter on creative co-production and the temporalities of involvement in research with young, disabled, and LGBTQ+ people in Policy Press’s ( @policypress.bsky.social ) new book ‘Insights into Creative and Participatory Research’. buff.ly/H2jVSYx

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

Been demoralising watching universities mindlessly embrace genAI "inevitability", mouth platitudes about AI ethics, principles & fairness even as it contaminates & degrades knowledge & infrastructure, undermines learning, erodes trust & creates massive burdens from all the above REFUSE. RESIST👇

The Supreme Court has today "strip[ped] fundamental human rights protections from potentially hundreds of thousands of severely disabled people" say a group of National Charities for disabled people. www.mind.org.uk/news-campaig...

An academic told me a while ago that for research grant applications to have a good chance of success, they have to be able to demonstrate commercial potential, which is not really the primary purpose of most research.

Professor Yvonne Daly, DCU: Funding changes threaten existence of criminal legal aid lawyers www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

France has opened up €1 university meals to every student. The subsidised 3 course meals are now available regardless of income after a survey found almost half of students had skipped meals for financial reasons. The Guardian buff.ly/ri032oB #ShareGoodNewsToo

A man at a meeting I attended recently made a big deal about how his office door doesn't say "Professor", just his name, and that's how he encourages healthy research culture. I pointed out that that works for him because, unlike me, he probably won't be mistaken for his own secretary.

You know, every day I get a new example of how my book draft on the relationship between criminalising social welfare policy and blame avoidance may actually be onto something

even by his meagre standards, it was an extraorindary week of buck-passing by the Taoiseach #speirgorm