When everything else in life is stripped bare, God is the one certainty that we can cling to.
15 Italians who were in Ireland for flight assistant training with Ryanair have Covid19. Some of them were under treatment in two hospitals in Dublin while others have been quarantined. It is believed that they contracted the virus in Bergamo, near Milan, where the training began. Bergamo is the area with of the largest number […]
Tim Jackson is in agreement with Joe Brolly about the Taoiseach’s speech.
A disproportionate number of very strange stories about the Reproductive Revolution originate in the land of fruits and nuts, i.e. California. However, it would be unfair to ignore Florida, a state which does a lot of heavy lifting in this area. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dave Barry claims that although Florida has only 6% of the US population, […]
So apparently there’s this illness going around at the moment, you might have heard about it, kind of a big deal. Sorry, don’t mean to be flippant – it is my defence mechanism. For a number of weeks now I have been viewing the COVID-19 outbreak in other parts of the world with some interest but […]
Irish Ambassador to Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, penned a book with Dr. Oliver Johnson entitled ‘Getting to Zero (A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline). The title, as indicated, relates to getting to zero cases of Ebola at a single time, meaning when the last infected patient had […]
Beginning with denial and ending with acceptance, the five stages of grief proposed by Swiss-American psychologist Ellizabeth Kubler-Ross made her famous during her lifetime and even became a staple of popular culture. Sometimes one almost wonders, watching the Irish reaction to one event after another, whether she would have been tempted to slot ‘Brit-bashing’ somewhere […]
St Patrick is now one of the world’s best known Catholic figures but the earliest known celebration of the saint is believed to have been held on March 17, 1631, marking the anniversary of his death in the 5th century. In that year, bubonic plague raged across parts of Europe, especially impacting Italy where the epidemic […]
After a very sunny week, the weekend is rainy
Just when many of us have become virtual prisoners in our own homes to help fight Covid-19, authorities have decided that they might start releasing actual prisoners from actual prisons during the crisis. First those with three and then those with six months left on their sentences would be released, say authorities, and maybe even […]
Some questions that we should ponder calmly when the pandemic has abated So far only about 6,500 people have died in the coronavirus pandemic. According to experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a worst-case scenario for the United States could be 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths. It’s all speculative, but whatever […]
A new study in the journal Clinical Ethics claims that permitting assisted dying would substantially benefit both those seeking assisted suicide and the public. Two Scottish academics, Dr David Shaw of the Universities of Basel and Maastricht, and Professor Alec Morton of the University of Strathclyde, posit three economic arguments: the cost to terminally-ill patients of a poor quality […]