Author: Fintan Owens

Recently, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, helped further diminish the reputation of the European Union in the United Kingdom by congratulating Vladimir Putin on winning his election. In a fawning message, Juncker wished the Russian “every success in carrying out your high responsibilities” and argued that “positive relations between the European Union and […]

Wake up at 10am, stay in bed until 2pm, potter about the rest of the day, and repeat. What the hell am I doing with my life post-Finals? I have no job waiting in the wings, I don’t know what career I want to do, and I’m pretty sure I’ve become the unthinkable… A walking, […]

Universities have a great history of activism, and igniting social change. At Berkeley and across the USA in the 60s, Students for a Democratic Society campaigned tirelessly for racial and social justice, and peace in Vietnam. Student activists played a major role the fight against apartheid through the 80s and 90s. The Occupy movement held […]

As an atheist I have grown tired (nay, exhausted) of being told that my world view gives me a bleak world with nothing to live for. One of the most common recourses of the religious when the epistemological battle is lost is to claim that without a god, without religion, life has no meaning, no […]

We need to wake up. The tragedy of Meriam Ibrahim, a woman sentenced to hang for marrying a Christian, has brought into sharp focus the full extent of religious persecution worldwide. The Times reported two weeks ago that 100,000 Christians are martyred every year – more than at any other time in history. A secret, […]

I always tend to find the reactionary, scaremongering claims made against Michael Gove quite amusing. ‘Education Secretary bans US texts from schools’. How radical and objectively untrue. The Education Secretary was very quick to suppress any uproar from within the teaching profession, ‘All we are doing is asking exam boards to broaden – not narrow […]

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Of all the speeches given at the Union no-confidence debate last week, a particular one stuck in my head more than any other. A male student stood up and publicly talked about having been sexually assaulted, and in doing so, he opened up a discussion that isn’t heard as much as it should be: the question […]

The debate on the no-confidence motion in the current Oxford Union President confirmed what I have suspected for some time. The Union is broken, and perhaps irredeemably so. For those that have not been following the national press story on the matter, the story began with a discussion in the Union regarding £1200 of Society […]

Firstly, tuition fees. I was there on the protests in both 2010 and 2011 and I was as disappointed as anyone that we failed to prevent a rise. I’d still rather we didn’t have them, but at least the system is as close to a graduate tax, my preferred alternative, as can be. However, it […]

On Easter Sunday, the Mail released an ‘exposé’ of Britain’s leading food bank charity, the Trussell Trust. Its field reporter detailed how when he pretended to be poor, he was given free food. (I await next week’s trailblazing investigative piece in which a Mail reporter pretends his house has been burgled and gets an outrageous […]

The world’s largest democracy has gone to the polls, and the turn-out has been immense. Across India, voters have poured in. It has not been all smooth, as would be expected – voting machines failed to work, names missed off electoral rolls, and most recently, the twin blasts in Chennai, killing one and wounding nine […]

Listening to the radio during an errand in the car over the past holiday, I found myself disturbed as I listened to an interview with journalist and author Edward Lucas. Lucas made a predictable argument about the severe dangers of the current confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, and the need for “strength;” though I disagree […]

In the 2010 general election, Nick Clegg’s performance in the three televised debates was widely credited for bringing the Lib Dems in “from the cold” after years in an electoral wilderness. If this was not a vindication of the huge popularity boost that public exposure has the potential to bring a party, I do not […]

An average of 129 young women died per year in the UK from cancer between 2009 and 2011. So I guess I shouldn’t have an issue with the #nomakeupselfie campaign, because that would make me a bad person. And yet, I’m afraid I do. Just because over 2 million pounds has been given to charity in the […]

The recent #NoMakeupSelfie campaign to raise cancer awareness has gone viral. The campaign, which was circulating around Facebook on Tuesday afternoon, asks women to upload selfies and “nominate” friends to follow suit, in a thinly-veiled ode to the recent “NekNominate” craze that suffocated the newsfeeds of 18-25s the world over. Financially, the campaign has been […]

As 2013 ends, the year in which our country lost her greatest modern Prime Minister, I find myself reflecting on the extent to which the position of women has changed since Margaret Thatcher first entered Parliament as MP for Finchley in 1959. Her first ministerial appointment came in October 1960, when she became Parliamentary Undersecretary […]