“In times of interregnum the evaporated power of Europe appears to flow and coalesce in the Mediterranean. The rocky outcropped islands seem to float above the tideless wine-dark waters which swirl around their banks.”

“In a nation of damp cottages still watched over by an Anglo-Irish economic oligarchy out of Dublin such a scheme aimed to shatter notions that Ireland would remain merely a backwater to the modern world.”

“So in these two Spheres there is something of a reorientation. It moves away from the old Left-Right spectrum which represented the perpetual revolution of Radical Liberalism (in which I include the majority of Leftism) against the maintenance of any traditional order or power structure. It moves away from this because quite simply there is virtually nothing left for them to rebel against, because the eternal rebels have achieved power— in their reign they have realised the total cogency of Free Love, Free (atomised) Individuals, and Free Markets.”

“Public perception management is the name of the game being played in relation to this mass belief, nudging and coercing it over to its point of view. Through a technique of manifold repetition, ubiquity and infotainment, public perception management is able to project power, and to signal jam countervailing narratives, intuitions, and even instincts.”

“Such a scenario of Hypernormalisation is well underway in Ireland. It is partly caused by the Clan mentality fixating collectively on Neoliberalism, and this factor will certainly compound it going forwards. Vestiges of our post-colonial inferiority complex will also play into this. Across the world Bobos are universally characterised by their need for and worship of social status, but for Irish Bobos this need to be perceived as being cosmopolitan and worthy in the eyes of their international peers is a pure gut-level desperation.”

“The collective realisation will be slow, but it will happen, and another idol of certitude may slowly emerge from the fallout. That idol might be the worship of Mother Gaia amidst the climate crisis, or the body of the oppressed minority in the pursuit of racial justice, or possibly an icon of homo technos, of the transhuman whose augmented being places him beyond the realm of worldly suffering. Neoliberalism is already toying with these idols, eyeing up and gauging each one, contemplating their utility and compatibility with the existing state of affairs.”

Meon investigates the ways in which Dublin City tries to mislead and confound its denizens through lazy misnomers, transparent veneers, mispurposed institutions, and thinly veiled money-grubbing.

“Over the past eighteen months, a new theological aesthetic has arisen—an anti-image of Christianity in the form of Covid mania. It is a religion replete with its lab-coated priests, its anti-vax heretics, its hand-sanitising holy water, and its veiling mask.”

“A ten-minute drive east of the Shannonside town of Foynes lies Europe's largest aluminium plant, Aughinish Alumina. Sprawled over the Aughinish peninsula, the plant employs a workforce of over 450 strong, and has garnered a reputation for its abuse of state support, as well as a below par environmental record…”

Ages ago, ‘ere the hamadryades died, the woods of Erin sang their joy for the kisses of the wanderers from the Aeolides. The winds were gentle with us then, for we loved our trees and ours was a fair and pleasant land to dwell in. Then to the hardy mariners who sailed stout-hearted out ‘twixt the Pillars of Hercules our isle was known as the Isle of Woods.

“Walk outside the gaff–emptiness in the city centre. Suffocating grey sky, high pressure. Like a breath being held. The odd car, a Deliveroo cyclist, a seagull poking at a refuse sack of a private waste-disposal company. A face mask lies discarded in the gutter. A newly built student-hotel, words tattooed all over the facade, sits and bides its time. Lights are on but nobody's home. ”

“Will it ever end? We are holding onto the balloon, and we keep ascending. If we keep holding on, we are surely doomed. And if we let go?”

There are few events in Irish history whose ramifications can still be felt so strongly now as the Plantation of Ulster. The cultural, political and religious ramifications of the Plantation are well-known, but the impact the Plantation had on the environment, particularly Ulster’s forestry, is rather less known, and its ramifications are no less tangible.

MEON is a new socio-environmental journal for the youth of Ireland. We seek to illuminate and re-envision the future relations between nature, man, and tech. We aspire to end the glorification of Capital, and to graft a new Gaelic culture devoted to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful…