Yvonne McGuinness | Scot’s Church | Clonmel Junction Festival

Art festivals can often be the worst place to see visual arts exhibitions. Not because of any bias against visual art – it’s just that most festivals try to cover all the arts and invariably most of the money is spent of theatre, music, dance etc and any exhibitions are tacked on. But occasionally there are incredible visual art works at a festival. This work is one of those.

Commissioned by Clonmel Junction Festival, The Well is a video and sound installation presented in a gorgeous, decommissioned 19^th century church. The film flickers between three screens – sometimes just a single screen, then two and occasionally all three – so the viewer is kept entranced. Underpinning the film is a haunting soundtrack, scored by the artist and Ellen King, full of atmospheric passage.

Shot at St Patricks Well, just outside…

By Robin Brodrick

The term “work-life balance” is thrown around with reckless abandon in today’s business world. A remarkable number of businesses purport that their company culture places importance on work-life balance, and it’s also one of the categories measured in the Best Places to Work survey.

Why is this important?

Because people can’t agree on the definition of work-life balance, but nearly 70% of job seekers report that work-life balance is the most important factor in their search for a new job (according to a recent poll conducted by Monster.com). I polled my network on LinkedIn and asked people to describe what work-life balance means to them. In return, I received 57 very different definitions of work-life balance. I include some of them later in this post, for your perusal.

Solving the Work-Life Balance Conundrum is Easy!

For Recruiters:

Stop telling candidates that your company offers work-life balance! Instead, get specific…

By Robin Brodrick

Are you tired of looking for the right job? Then why not let the right job find you? All you need to do is give your digital dossier a makeover!

What is a digital dossier?

Everything you post online merges together to form your digital dossier (also called a digital footprint). If you’re posting videos of baby animals doing adorable things, then you will create an insanely cute digital footprint. If you’re posting unique and accurate insights about your industry then you will create a valuable digital dossie. If you’re posting rants or inappropriate photos then you will create an undesirable digital footprint. And so on and so forth.

Why you should care about your digital footprint

Recruiters are flocking to social media to find top talent. They use it to search for and to contact candidates, to keep tabs on applicants, as part of the pre and post interview…

Scientists. Doctors. Academics. Investors. Analysts. Patient advocates. There are a wide variety of social thought leaders in the biotech and pharma Twitterscape (you know, it’s like ‘landscape’, but for Twitter).

There are plenty of articles addressing the regulatory and compliance concerns that are preventing the industry from embracing social media, but very few that talk about bringing the community together to engage in meaningful social conversations. Can you imagine how much activity there could be if more than 10 of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies in the world used all 3 of the top social media channels?

This post is intended to provide you with a list (in no particular order) of the top 20 industry influencers on Twitter as of 26 May 2016 so that you will know who to follow. But it is also a dare to engage with these influencers to get real-time industry news and information and…

We urgently need new rules to prevent the capture of our politics by billionaires and corporations and their secretive funding.

How is this acceptable? A multimillionaire City asset manager has pledged to spend up to £700,000 on ousting Labour MPs who campaigned against Brexit. Jeremy Hosking will use his money to ensure that there is as little parliamentary opposition to a hard Brexit as possible. Why should multimillionaires be allowed to try to buy political results?

Allowed? That’s too soft a word. It is enabled by our pathetic, antiquated and anti-democratic rules on political spending. Hosking claims he wants to secure “the sovereign future of this independent-minded democracy”. But there is no greater threat to sovereignty, independence or democracy than the power money wields over our politics.

There are three categories of concern here. The first is transparent political funding, such as Hosking’s. Then there is opaque funding, that…

Campaigners have branded the system “disgraceful” and a “sham” after the policy was slipped out by the government.

The government faces outrage after it was accused of setting a target to turn down the vast majority of benefit appeals.

Critics branded the system a “sham” after the policy was released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The row involves Mandatory Reconsiderations (MRs) – internal reviews people must go through if their claims for welfare are rejected, before they can launch a full appeal.

MRs were already under fire because they are far less likely than full appeals to end in victory.

Now it’s been revealed staff have a performance measure that says 80% of decisions “are to be upheld” – in other words, MRs reject 80% of claims.

They met this ‘Key Performance Indicator’ between April 2016 and March 2017 after rejecting 87% of claims, the DWP statement…

This piece was written in response to Philip Larkin’s poem, Afternoons.

Iris stands apart, the smile playing on her lips temporarily eclipsed, as her mouth pinches a cigarette.