The Marshall Review

I am often asked, directly or indirectly, why my essays stop where they do.

Why, after exploring a question from multiple directions, do I resist the final step? Why not advocate more clearly? Why not propose a solution? Why not tell the reader what ought to be done?

The answer is neither uncertainty nor reluctance. It is a matter of sequence. We live in an age that prizes opinions. We are encouraged to take positions rapidly, often before a question has been fully understood. Public debate is increasingly organised around answers.

Yet many of our deepest disagreements are not disagreements about answers at all. They are disagreements about the questions to which those answers are addressed. When two people argue over immigration, education, taxation, climate change, religion, or identity, they often assume they are debating solutions. More frequently, they are operating from different understandings of the problem itself. Their disagreement lies upstream from the conclusion.

In such circumstances, further advocacy rarely helps. It merely adds another answer to a conversation that lacks a shared question.

My own instinct as an essayist has therefore been to proceed differently.

The essay, at least as I practise it, is not a vehicle for resolution. It is a means of attention. It begins with a tension, a puzzle, an ambiguity, or an apparent contradiction. The task is not immediately to dissolve that tension but to inhabit it. To examine it from multiple perspectives. To remain with it long enough for underlying relationships to become visible.

This approach owes much to an early lesson I learned in education. Like many students, I entered discussions believing that achievement consisted in arriving at the correct answer. What I gradually discovered was that the most transformative moments often occurred before the answer. They occurred when an unexpected question revealed that the problem itself was not what I had assumed.

Once the question changes, everything changes.

A solution that appears obvious from one perspective can seem inadequate from another. A conflict that appeared irreconcilable may reveal previously unnoticed common ground. What looked like competing truths may turn out to be partial descriptions of a larger reality.

Understanding begins not with agreement but with perception.

This has important consequences for democracy. Agreement, consensus, and genuine democratic outcomes require more than the aggregation of opinions. They require some degree of shared understanding. Before citizens can move forward together, they must first know what it is they are moving forward from. They must possess, however imperfectly, a common view of the question before them. Without that shared understanding, calls for action become little more than competing assertions. The result is not deliberation but collision.

The essay can play a modest but important role here. Not by deciding matters in advance, but by helping to clarify the terrain on which decisions will eventually be made. Not by instructing readers what to think, but by helping them see more fully what is at stake.

This is why my essays so often stop where they do.

I do not withhold advocacy because I believe conclusions are impossible. Nor do I imagine that every question can remain permanently open. Decisions must ultimately be made. Judgements must eventually be formed. Action is unavoidable.

But action that precedes understanding is often premature.

The task I set myself is therefore a limited one. It is to contribute, where I can, to a richer perception of the question. To bring hidden relationships into view. To make visible some dimension of reality that may previously have gone unnoticed. Only then, I believe, can meaningful disagreement occur. Only then can genuine agreement emerge.

The essay ends where collective judgement begins. It is not the final stage of public reasoning. It is the stage before that. Its purpose is not to tell us where to go, but to help us see where we are.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.

David Marshall Dublin

The Question Before the Answer

The controversy surrounding the sale of Israel Government bonds in Ireland has generated more heat than light. Yet beneath the legal arguments and political slogans lies a question that is both older and larger than this particular dispute.

The question is not simply whether a bond should or should not be sold. The question is how a democratic state navigates the space between three different forms of authority: legal authority, democratic authority and moral authority.

The Israel bonds issue merely makes that tension visible. Ireland's Constitution is unusual in that it does not speak only in the language of institutions and procedures. Article 29 affirms devotion to peace, international justice and morality, commitment to the peaceful settlement of disputes, and acceptance of the generally recognised principles of international law as a rule of conduct between states.

Yet Ireland is also a member of the European Union, a community of states that frequently acts collectively in foreign affairs and where major sanctions decisions generally require unanimity among member states.

Meanwhile, institutions such as the Central Bank of Ireland are deliberately designed to operate independently of day-to-day political pressures. Their purpose is not to make moral judgements about the conduct of foreign governments but to administer the law and regulatory framework established by the State and the European Union.

Each of these arrangements makes sense in isolation. Taken together, however, they create a productive tension. A citizen may look at events in the world and conclude that Ireland's constitutional commitment to international justice points in a particular direction. The Government may respond that its room for manoeuvre is constrained by EU obligations. The Central Bank may reply that it has neither the mandate nor the discretion to make such judgments at all. At that point many people become frustrated.

Responsibility appears to disappear into a maze of institutions.

But perhaps this is exactly the moment where democracy begins rather than ends. A healthy constitutional order is not one in which moral questions never arise. It is one in which citizens can identify tensions and subject them to scrutiny. Laws are tested. Powers are examined. Assumptions are challenged. Institutions are asked to explain themselves.

The alternative is ossification. If no one ever asks whether current legal arrangements adequately reflect constitutional values, then constitutional values slowly become decorative. They remain on paper while losing their influence on public life. The important distinction is that testing a tension is not the same thing as rejecting the rule of law. A democracy needs mechanisms through which citizens, campaigners, politicians and governments can ask whether existing structures remain fit for purpose.

This brings us to the Restrictive Financial Measures (State of Israel) Bill 2025, introduced by Sinn Féin. The Bill sought to give the Minister for Finance power to prevent the Central Bank of Ireland from facilitating the sale of Israeli government bonds within the European Union. Supporters argued that Ireland should not facilitate the raising of funds by a state whose actions in Gaza had drawn widespread international criticism. Opponents argued that the proposal conflicted with the legal independence of the Central Bank and would be ineffective in practice.

On 28 May 2025, the Bill was defeated in the Dáil by 87 votes to 75 at Second Stage.

For many observers, the significance of that vote lay not in the result itself but in what the debate revealed. The controversy exposed an uncertainty about where authority ultimately resides when constitutional values, democratic sentiment, administrative independence and European obligations pull in different directions.

One response is to accept the constraint as the final answer. Another is to ask whether the constraint itself should be examined.

That examination need not be hostile to either the Central Bank or the European Union. On the contrary, it may be an affirmation of both. Constitutional democracies evolve through moments where established legal arrangements are tested against changing public understandings of justice. Viewed in this light, revisiting the 2025 legislation is not primarily about Israel. It is about understanding whether Ireland possesses sufficient democratic machinery to reconcile constitutional values with the realities of EU membership and independent regulatory institutions.

The question is not whether the law should simply yield to moral sentiment. The rule of law remains essential. The question is whether there exists a visible pathway through which a democratically expressed moral concern can be translated into lawful state action when citizens believe an important constitutional principle is engaged.

If such a pathway exists, the controversy may help reveal it. If it does not, then perhaps that absence is itself worthy of democratic attention.

There may even be a broader European value in such an exercise. One member state, acting openly and in good faith, can sometimes illuminate questions that all member states share. The purpose of such an inquiry would not be to weaken European cooperation but to understand how constitutional conscience, democratic choice and collective decision-making can coexist within it.

After all, many constitutional advances begin exactly this way. A tension that had previously been hidden becomes impossible to ignore. Institutions are required to explain where authority lies and why. Boundaries that appeared fixed are sometimes confirmed and sometimes redrawn.

Seen from this perspective, the Israel bonds dispute is not merely an argument about finance, foreign policy or administrative procedure. It is a reminder that democratic societies are not built upon the elimination of tension. They are built upon the capacity to live with tension, to examine it, and occasionally to test it.

The challenge is not to make legal authority, democratic authority and moral authority perfectly coincide. That has never been possible. The challenge is to ensure that when they diverge, citizens retain some visible pathway through which the conversation can continue. The real contribution Ireland could make in this instance may not be the achievement of a particular outcome.

It may be the willingness to ask the question.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

When argument has nothing to stand on

Some years back I was awarded a DPhil for work I had published two decades earlier, work that was judged to make an original contribution to knowledge. The first revealed a structure for presenting a defence of nurses accused of wrongdoing. It explored how to advance an argument inside a recognised hierarchy with actors who largely behaved with integrity. The second revealed a structure for engaging public sector workers in discussion. It examined how people could draw on their own experience and develop their opinions about a major shift in government policy that would affect both their work and their representation.

In both pieces of work the environments carried a particular character. A kind of liberal consensus that was so familiar at the time that we barely noticed it. In the tribunal cases the hierarchy itself provided the frame. Everyone in the room recognised the authority of the structure. Everyone understood the rules and the evidential standards. Everyone behaved broadly with enough integrity for argument to matter. It was possible to advance a defence because the structure could hold the weight of disagreement. Power was present of course. It always is. But it was channelled and contained. Given form by the procedures that governed the room. Argument belonged there because the environment itself supported the activity of argument.

The second situation shared the same assumptions though expressed differently. These were not formal hearings but part of a national conversation involving more than 650,000 public sector workers attempting to make sense of a significant policy shift. There was no hierarchy and no tribunal procedure. There was however mutual recognition. Despite the scale of the undertaking people listened because they recognised their own concerns in those of others. They were willing to explore and revise their views because the structure we built together made that possible. Their opinions shifted not because one person persuaded them but because they persuaded each other. Consensus emerged because the conditions allowed it. Shared experience. Trust in the process. A sense that everyone was participating in good faith.

Power was present here too but moderated by familiarity and reciprocity. Both environments rested on the same quiet assumptions. That argument is meaningful. That persuasion is possible. That norms are broadly shared. That the structures we inhabit can contain the power within them. These were not abstract ideals. They were the material conditions that made argument possible. They shaped the liberal imagination of the time and they shaped my own understanding of how people reason together. They convinced me that though we may differ in our wants needs and desires there is often a path to resolution if we place in our way the machinery through which disagreement can be managed. The participation of everyone involved is not incidental to that process. It is one of its essential ingredients.

At the same time as those two pieces of work and for some years afterwards I was engaged in a programme I titled Tackling Racism. That work took me into closed rooms where regard for others was not shared in the way it had been in tribunals or workplace discussions. The assumptions that had quietly underpinned those earlier environments were simply absent. The expectation that people would listen. The expectation that they would recognise each other. The expectation that they would accept the legitimacy of the process itself. In those rooms the role of some participants emerged very quickly. A desire to bully. To intimidate. To dominate.

These were not the anti-racism workshops familiar in workplaces and trade union halls where we were often dealing with prejudice born of distance or unfamiliarity. Misunderstandings that could sometimes be worked through. These meetings were different. For some participants they became opportunities for larger scale bullying and repression. The same behaviours that had already shown themselves in abuse directed at individuals on the shop floor in corridors in car parks and on the street. The structure could not contain it.

Sometimes a realisation arrives in an instant. Sometimes it comes slowly as if the mind is adjusting itself grain by grain. This one arrived neither way. It was prolonged. And it was punishing. I denied it. I fought it. I kept returning to the belief that there had to be a way. That if I could only find the right structure the right approach the right moment then the same regard for others that had shaped my earlier work would re-emerge. I had seen people change their minds. I had seen consensus form. I had seen argument work. Surely it could work here too.

But the more I failed the more I felt the realisation rising. Not as an idea but as a physical sensation. Something welling up from the pit of my stomach. The assumptions I had carried from those earlier environments simply did not apply. The quiet respect for others. The willingness to listen. The expectation of integrity. The belief that everyone in the room was engaged in the same activity. None of these could be assumed.

What confronted me was not a breakdown in argument. It was the absence of the conditions that make argument possible.

I had spent years believing that good structures could enable disagreement to become something productive. That if people could be brought into the same space then understanding could emerge. That persuasion remained possible.

What I discovered was the limit of that belief. Argument is not a universal tool. It depends upon conditions that cannot be assumed. It depends upon structures capable of holding power. It depends upon shared norms however imperfect. It depends upon a willingness to recognise others not merely as opponents but as participants in a common endeavour. Remove those conditions and argument does not fail.

It ceases to exist.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

Ireland and Europe spend a great deal of time talking about “the future”. Visions. Strategies. Missions. Transitions. The vocabulary is endless. Yet beneath all the rhetoric sits one stubborn, unavoidable question: what do we do about the material world we actually live in?

Not the abstract economy. Not the digital promise. Not the political theatre. The physical world. The minerals extracted from the ground. The products manufactured in factories. The energy consumed in homes and businesses. The waste buried in landfills. The plastics entering rivers and seas. The emissions entering the atmosphere.

Every modern society ultimately rests upon these material realities. And this is where the circular economy stops being a technical policy and becomes something much larger. It becomes the quiet test of whether our vision of the future can survive contact with the physical world. Because circularity is not a side project of environmentalism. It is the structural hinge connecting climate ambition, industrial competitiveness, and social fairness.

If a country or a continent cannot resolve that hinge, its future is not a strategy. It is a marketing exercise.

More than a policy

The circular economy is often presented as an environmental programme focused on recycling, waste reduction, and resource efficiency. That description is accurate, but incomplete. At its deepest level, the circular economy is not about waste management. It is about redefining humanity's relationship with materials.

For over two centuries, industrial civilisation has largely been organised around a simple logic: extract, produce, consume, discard. The model worked because resources appeared abundant, energy appeared cheap, and environmental consequences appeared distant. Today none of those assumptions can be taken for granted. Climate pressures, supply chain vulnerabilities, resource dependencies, and ecological degradation all point towards the same conclusion: a civilisation organised around unlimited extraction has begun to encounter its own limits.

The circular economy represents an attempt to answer a profound question: Can a society learn the logic of stewardship after being built upon the logic of abundance?

What Europe's political families agree on and why it matters

Across Europe's political spectrum, the circular economy now appears in virtually every programme, manifesto, and strategic framework. The Party of European Socialists sees it as part of a socially just green transition, ensuring workers and communities are protected as economic systems evolve. The Greens emphasise durability, repairability, and the right to repair. Renew Europe focuses on innovation, digital product passports, and market incentives. The European People's Party tends to favour business-led efficiency, competitiveness, and voluntary approaches.

The differences are real. Yet the more significant fact is that all of them have arrived at the same destination. The linear model is reaching its limits. Political families that disagree on taxation, migration, regulation, and public spending increasingly agree on this fundamental point. That convergence matters. When competing political traditions begin recognising the same structural reality, it usually signals something deeper than ideology. It signals a constraint imposed by the world itself.

The conceptual tension: what does “circular” actually mean?

Yet agreement on the destination does not mean agreement on the route. Circularity sounds straightforward. In practice, it is a battleground of competing definitions. Does waste-to-energy count as circular? Should priority be given to material recovery or energy recovery? Is a highly durable product always preferable, even if it slows the adoption of newer technologies? Should efficiency be the goal, or sufficiency?

These disagreements are not academic. They shape investment, regulation, industrial planning, and consumer behaviour. More importantly, they reveal a deeper tension. The circular economy asks us to rethink what progress means. For generations, progress has often been measured through volume: more production, more consumption, more throughput. Circularity introduces a different possibility. Perhaps progress lies not in moving more material through the system, but in creating more value with less material movement. That shift sounds subtle.

In reality, it represents one of the most significant economic and cultural adjustments of the modern era.

The delivery tension: who pays, who adapts, who benefits?

Even where there is conceptual agreement, delivery remains difficult. Circularity requires products to be redesigned. Supply chains must be reorganised. Repair and recycling infrastructure must be built. Workers must acquire new skills. Standards must be harmonised across borders. Digital systems must track products throughout their life cycles.

None of this is free. None of it is frictionless. And it raises the oldest political question in history: Who pays? Social democrats tend to favour public investment and worker protections. Liberals often prefer market incentives. Conservatives warn against excessive regulatory burdens. Environmental parties seek stronger obligations on producers.

These are legitimate disagreements. But they cannot obscure a larger fact. The transition will happen one way or another. The real choice is whether societies invest in managing the transition or pay the costs of avoiding it.

The producer tension: resistance from the material world

Businesses resist circularity for understandable reasons. Repairability can threaten existing product cycles. Extended producer responsibility increases costs. Transparency requirements expose supply chains. Material substitutions disrupt procurement systems built over decades. Electronics, construction, automotive manufacturing, textiles, and consumer goods all confront different versions of the same challenge.

Circularity demands change. Change creates uncertainty. And uncertainty creates resistance. This is not villainy. It is structure. The material world does not reorganise itself because policymakers write reports or politicians make speeches. Future visions encounter resistance precisely because they require existing systems to behave differently. Any serious strategy must acknowledge that reality.

Why this matters for Ireland and Europe

Ireland's future, like Europe's, will be shaped by three converging forces. Climate limits. Industrial competitiveness. Social cohesion. The circular economy sits exactly where those forces meet. It determines whether climate action strengthens or weakens industry. Whether industrial policy creates or destroys jobs. Whether environmental ambition lowers or raises the everyday cost of living. More fundamentally, it determines whether Europe remains merely a consumer market dependent upon resources, technologies, and supply chains controlled elsewhere, or becomes a continent capable of sustaining its own economic resilience.

For Ireland, the challenge is equally significant. The question is not simply how we manage waste. The question is whether we remain a peripheral economy that imports solutions designed elsewhere or become a society capable of designing solutions ourselves.

The quiet truth

Circularity is not glamorous. It does not lend itself easily to slogans. It is technical, infrastructural, incremental, and often invisible. But history suggests that societies are ultimately judged not by the elegance of their visions but by their ability to reconcile those visions with material reality. That is why the circular economy matters. It is not merely an environmental policy. It is a test of whether advanced societies can learn to prosper within limits. A test of whether economic dynamism can coexist with stewardship. A test of whether climate responsibility, industrial strength, and social fairness can reinforce one another rather than compete.

If Ireland or Europe cannot meet that test, then much of the language of missions, transitions, and transformation will amount to little more than noise. But if we can meet it, then the future becomes something more than a political promise. It becomes a civilisation learning how to endure. And eventually, a material reality. David Marshall Dublin

Every publication eventually acquires its own odd little customs. Some have house styles. Some have mission statements. Some have logos carefully developed by consultants after lengthy meetings involving flipcharts and expensive biscuits.

I was once present at a meeting in a Random House imprint devoted almost entirely to the colour of the spine of one of my books. I had arrived with what seemed to me a perfectly reasonable vision involving shades of green. Around the table, opinions were offered, alternatives proposed and possibilities weighed.

Eventually the chairman arrived, somewhat late. He listened to the discussion for a moment before announcing that he had just come from visiting bookshops. “I've been looking at books on shelves,” he said. “It has to be red.” That was the end of the matter. The book acquired a red spine.

The Marshall publications have accumulated something rather different. Over the years, a simple mark began appearing on documents, websites, notebooks and drafts. Nothing elaborate. Just a small visual signature. A reminder that a piece of work had passed through my hands on its way into the world. The mark had deeper roots than I first realised. For many years I carried a well-thumbed James Hill Teeline shorthand textbook. Journalists of a certain generation will know the book. It travelled everywhere with me, surviving trains, coffee shops, newsrooms and countless notebooks. Somewhere along the way, my initials, DM, found their way into Teeline notation. Not formally, perhaps, and certainly not in a form that would satisfy every shorthand purist, but in a stylised version that evolved through repeated use in margins, notes and drafts.

The result was a simple graphic mark. At some point, the mark acquired a name. The Sig.

The Sig was never intended to be a logo. It simply emerged, much as many useful things do. A line here, a flourish there, until eventually it became recognisable. But every mark contains a hidden possibility. What if it were alive? Somewhere between a Teeline textbook, a notebook, a cup of coffee and far too much thinking about matters that probably should not be thought about, the Sig acquired a second identity: Sigi. Not a mascot exactly. Not a logo. More an occasional visitor.

The Sig is the mark. Sigi is what happens when the mark decides to step out for a stroll.

There is another distinction worth noting. The Sig is a mark. Marks tend to live in the centre of things. They certify documents, identify owners and announce conclusions. Sigi appears to prefer the margins. In fact, among the scattered fragments that make up what passes for Sigi scholarship, one principle appears more frequently than any other: Sigi's Rule #1: There is always something happening in the margins. The rule applies surprisingly often. The important conversation happens after the meeting ends. The revealing detail lurks in the footnote. The unfinished notebook entry occasionally proves more interesting than the polished report.

Looking back, I now suspect Sigi had little interest in becoming a logo. What he wanted was residency in the spaces between ideas. Readers seeking a fuller account of these matters will find that an unexpectedly large body of research has accumulated at sigi.ie, (https://sigi.ie), although its reliability remains a matter of ongoing debate.

Like all respectable characters, Sigi possesses a somewhat uncertain origin story. He may have escaped from the pages of that old shorthand textbook. He may have wandered out of the margin of a policy briefing. He may simply be what happens when a writer spends too much time alone with half-finished ideas.

I have other suspicions. Back in 1992, I wrote a piece about the proposed development of Euro Disney, as Disneyland Paris was then becoming known. One of the controversies of the day concerned facial hair. Disney reportedly discouraged moustaches among employees at a time when moustaches were rather more popular in France than they seemed to be in corporate America.

Looking back now, I am almost certain I saw Sigi for the first time. As I worked on the article, a small shape appeared to slide from the side of the page. It paused for a moment, examined a photograph of Walt Disney, and then repositioned itself directly beneath the nose and above the upper lip. There it remained. A moustache. Entirely innocent, of course. At least that was Sigi's version of events. Looking back, I suspect that was the moment I first realised that Sigi possessed a sense of humour.

There remains, however, one unresolved question in Sigi scholarship. The question is not where he came from. The question is how he entered the machine. For years, Sigi's existence appeared confined to paper. He inhabited notebooks, manuscript margins, shorthand exercises and the occasional photograph of unsuspecting individuals who suddenly found themselves sporting entirely unauthorised moustaches.

Then something changed. I can date the event with unusual precision. It was 3 April 2003. The location was one of the early Fujitsu Siemens Tablet PCs running Microsoft's pioneering tablet software. These devices now belong to a curious chapter in computing history. They arrived years before the world was ready for them and were often regarded as interesting but impractical experiments. I know better. Because Sigi was there.

I remember catching sight of him among the pages of a Stephen Covey planning application. Not openly. More a suggestion than an appearance. A familiar shape beneath glass where previously it had existed only on paper. From that moment onwards, the migration appears to have accelerated.

A year or so later, he was occasionally glimpsed hiding inside early beta versions of Microsoft OneNote. Sigi has never been one for grand entrances. He simply appeared in digital notebooks much as he had once occupied paper ones, settling comfortably into margins and waiting patiently for an opportunity to make himself useful. How he made the crossing remains uncertain. Perhaps he travelled through a stylus. Perhaps he slipped through a handwritten note. Perhaps he was carried across by one of those early synchronisation processes that connected paper habits to digital worlds. Sigi himself remains characteristically unhelpful on the matter. Asked directly, he merely points out that paper and screens have always been less different than people imagine.

Nobody can say for certain. The official history maintains that Sigi originated in a shorthand textbook, acquired a name somewhere in the 1990s and crossed into the digital world in 2003. That account is neat, orderly and almost certainly incomplete.

The alternative possibility is that Sigi was always there. That he merely borrowed the Teeline mark as a convenient disguise. That notebooks, computer screens and policy papers are simply the places where he occasionally chooses to reveal himself. Historians of Sigi remain divided on the matter.

What is known is that he now accompanies the growing family of Marshall projects. Marshall on Policy provides analysis, briefings and commentary on public affairs. The Marshall Review collects essays, reflections and observations. And somewhere nearby, usually just outside the field of vision, Sigi continues his quiet wanderings.

From time to time he may appear as a sketch, an animation or an unexpected observation. He should not be encouraged. Experience suggests this only makes him worse. Still, the world contains enough certainty, enough outrage and enough people determined to explain everything. A little curiosity seems no bad thing.

And perhaps that is Sigi's purpose. Not to explain the world. Simply to remind us that there is always something happening in the margins (rule #1).

Looking back, I suspect he had been waiting there all along. It simply took me a very long time to notice.

David Marshall The Marshall Review Marked with the Sig. ✒️

A press release landed in my inbox this week about the Marine Institute's research vessel Tom Crean. It was full of the expected details. Days at sea. Scientific surveys. Fisheries research. Seabed mapping. Climate studies. The vessel travelled more than 31,000 nautical miles last year and is now one of Ireland's most important scientific assets.

But it was not the statistics that caught my attention. It was the name.

Years ago, when I wrote about Tom Crean, there was often a need to explain who he was. He was known in parts of Kerry and among Antarctic enthusiasts, but he had not yet become a household figure. Mention his name and many people would look puzzled. Back then, from time to time I would stop by Tom Crean's pub in Annascaul. Visitors liked to joke that they had made it to the South Pole, albeit by a somewhat easier route than Crean himself. Today the pub is a destination on the tourist map. Then, it felt more like a quiet local reminder of a largely forgotten man.

Now, things are different. A state-of-the-art research ship carries his name. Schoolchildren learn about him. His story has entered the fabric of Irish public life. The remarkable thing is not that Tom Crean has changed. The remarkable thing is that we have.

Names are curious things. We tend not to notice them until we stop and ask why they are there. Every nation reveals something about itself through the names it gives to ships, bridges, buildings and institutions.

The choice of Tom Crean is an interesting one. He was not a politician. He was not a military leader. He left no manifesto behind him and founded no movement. By most conventional measures, he was an unlikely candidate for national recognition.

What he possessed was something quieter. Endurance. Reliability. Courage. A willingness to keep going when circumstances became difficult. In the great Antarctic expeditions of the early twentieth century, he was rarely the man making the speeches or standing in the spotlight. More often he was the man pulling the sledge.

Perhaps that is precisely why he speaks to modern Ireland. There was a time when Irish history concentrated heavily on conflict and politics. Increasingly, however, we seem drawn to different kinds of figures. People who built things. People who explored. People who persisted. People whose achievements emerged not from ideology but from character.

The research vessel Tom Crean seems an almost perfect symbol of that shift. The original Tom Crean ventured towards the unknown edges of the map. The modern Tom Crean explores a different frontier. It studies the oceans around us, gathers evidence, maps the seabed and helps us understand our place in a changing world. Both are engaged in exploration. One travelled into physical darkness. The other seeks to illuminate what lies beneath familiar waters.

I found myself smiling at the thought. Somewhere between the quiet pub in Annascaul and the research vessel sailing out of Galway Harbour lies a story about Ireland itself. Not about how Tom Crean became famous. About how we finally learned to recognise him. . David Marshall Costa Coffee Omni Park Shopping Centre Swords, Co. Dublin

Ireland’s public policy challenges are becoming more complex. They cross domains. Housing affects transport. Transport affects energy. Energy affects climate and the cost of living. These systems cannot be understood in isolation. They need clarity. They need structure. They need explanation.

Marshall on Policy has always tried to make public policy understandable. But essays alone cannot carry the weight of a changing system. Essays explore ideas. They test arguments. They follow a line of thought. They are valuable, but they are not enough. A more structured form is needed. Something that explains how a system works and why it matters. Something that shows the choices ahead without turning into advocacy. Something that is calm, clear, and constructive.This is where policy briefings come in.

A policy briefing is not an opinion piece. It is not a reaction to the news cycle. It is not a polemic. It is a way to explain a public policy system in a structured way. It sets out the landscape. It defines the forces at play. It outlines the choices. It shows the consequences of those choices. It gives readers a clear picture of how a system works and where it is going.

Ireland needs this. The public conversation often jumps from headline to headline without explaining the system underneath. We talk about housing without talking about land. We talk about transport without talking about demand. We talk about energy without talking about storage, tariffs, or spilled electricity. The result is confusion.

People know the symptoms but not the structure. They know the problems but not the system that produces them.Policy briefings are a way to fix this.They are slow. They are deliberate. They are structured. They build understanding over time. They give readers a clear foundation so that later debates make sense. They are not about winning arguments. They are about explaining the system so that arguments can be made on solid ground.

This is a new direction for Marshall on Policy. It is a shift from essays to architecture. The briefings will sit alongside the essays, but they will do a different job. They will build a coherent picture of Ireland’s public policy systems. They will unfold slowly. They will be supported by technical notes at insights.marshall.ie. They will form the backbone of a larger project to explain Ireland’s energy system clearly and constructively.

The first briefing looks at Ireland’s spilled energy problem. Later briefings will explore flexible demand, storage, tariffs, infrastructure, and the longer‑term question of export potential. Each briefing will be supported by detailed notes. Over time these notes will grow into a full index of insights. This will become a reference layer for the entire project.

This is the beginning of a new phase for Marshall on Policy. A shift toward clarity. A shift toward structure. A shift toward explaining the systems that shape Ireland’s future. David Marshall Dublin

Marshall on Policy https://policy.marshall.ie

The Marshall Review can now be found directly at https://rvw.ie.

The new address is shorter, easier to type and easier to share, but nothing else has changed. The journal's essays, reviews and ongoing series will continue to appear as before.

Existing links to review.marshall.ie will continue to work and will redirect automatically to the current site.

I write for readers. Whether you arrive regularly or happen upon an article by chance, your visit is appreciated. I hope you'll find a reason to return to rvw.ie from time to time. You're always welcome here.

David Marshall Dublin

From a village bypass to a €900 million energy bill, the pattern is the same: commitments made first, questions asked later. Ireland has lived through this logic before.

Not far from my home in north county Dublin is a road. It began life as an arterial road, purpose‑built to carry considerable commuter traffic in and out of Dublin, with increased safety.

But built as a bypass around a small village, it facilitated new homes, new shops, new schools on both sides of the road; the inevitable (or is it?) ribbon development. So now we have school students, mums with pushchairs, people out walking dogs, joggers, and village cyclists using and crossing the road daily. That’s a dangerous mix of village life and commuter traffic. I’m not pointing the finger here, but a little planning would have avoided this disturbing combination.

I’m simply saying sequencing is substance. The development that has unfolded in that area over the last decade needed a little more forethought, a little more analysis in context. Yes, we want the homes, the shops, the schools and the like. But we want them assembled into new communities, safely.

When the order of decisions is not thought through, outcomes drift. And the same pattern is visible far beyond local roads. The Strategic Emergency Reserve Bill is simply the latest example. The State is advancing a €900 million infrastructure commitment before the cost analysis, the alternatives assessment, the emissions modelling, the operating rules, or the governance framework have been published. Let’s cut through the fog and the rhetoric and look at what is actually being said: “Let’s spend €900 million and see what happens — the Minister can field the problems.”

Let’s not mince words. This is the worst kind of government. And the Irish people deserve better. This is not about political stance or political preference or one party being superior to another. It’s about the basic skill set required to govern: understand the problem, consult those affected, evaluate the options, then act. The Strategic Emergency Reserve Bill reverses that order. And with no expressed justification or legitimacy for the order of decisions, the State has weakened its own case before it has even made it.

Across the NGO sector, the expressed concerns are consistent. Planning law has been set aside. Environmental safeguards have been narrowed. Judicial review has been restricted. Costs remain unclear. And the long‑term system effects have not been assessed. Ireland has lived through this kind of decision‑making before. The government is repeating the mistakes of the 19th‑century British, who panicked into building unnecessary barracks across Ireland. And it is a strange place for an independent State to find itself, after all we’ve come through.

Sequencing is not a procedural detail. It is the substance of good governance. When analysis follows commitment, it becomes justification rather than guidance. When exceptional powers are used without exceptional explanation, scrutiny thins. And when infrastructure is approved before its operating rules exist, the system begins to shape itself around the gap.

Ireland’s energy system is entering a decade of structural change. Decisions made quickly will be lived with slowly. The question is not speed. It is sequence.

Sequencing is substance.

The full LNG analysis can be found here: https://go.marshall.ie/LNG-bill-analysis

I was educated in a school founded eight centuries ago, given its Royal Charter by Elizabeth I, and governed, in spirit. and often in daily practice, by Oxford and Cambridge dons. It was the kind of place where language arrived not as a living medium but as a set of obligations. You did not “learn English”; you inherited it. You spelled organize with a Z because that was the proper, etymological form. You cast your sentences in the passive because it was dignified. And in sixth form classrooms, you spoke a kind of Middle English that had never quite admitted the existence of the twentieth century.

It was a beautiful education in many ways. But it left me with the sense that language was something to be obeyed rather than understood.

I’ve spent years unlearning that stance. Not rejecting it, there is value in precision, in etymology, in the long continuity of English thought. But loosening its grip. A writer cannot live by rules alone. A writer must live by judgement.

This is why my style sheet has begun to change. It is no longer a ledger of prohibitions inherited from Hart, Butcher, the ghost of some medieval grammarian, or the Elizabethan drive for a language fit to govern by. It is becoming a record of decisions: small, careful, reader‑facing choices about how thought should appear on the page.

The shift is simple to describe and difficult to practise. I’ve begun to prefer relation before interruption. If secondary material has a clear logical connection – cause, concession, condition, definition – I try to express it through syntax rather than punctuation. Let the reader feel the continuity of thought. Use parenthesis only when the mind genuinely steps aside.

This tendency has changed how I see the page. A style sheet is no longer a set of instructions; it is a companion in editorial judgement. It asks: what does the reader need at this moment? How do I help them enter, follow, trust, and remain with the essay? And how do I make my thinking visible without making it burdensome?

In a way, the work feels like reclaiming the language I was given; not rejecting its history, but choosing its future. Not Middle English in a sixth form classroom, but a living English shaped by the needs of the reader and the movement of thought.

I’ve written a short note about this evolution on write.as here in my essayist’s notebook: esy.ie https://go.marshall.ie/style-sheet-essay-notes