Almost all political energy these days is expended not on serving people, but on fixing them.
This is an example, frankly, not of some great conspiracy to do away with cash, but of a bank making a short-sighted business decision.
If the world’s only hope is net zero, then the world has no hope at all.
If there’s a lesson to learn from Putin, it is in the value of governing in your national self interest.
In Ireland we do not have open debate. Often, we do not even have the pretence of it.
The Irish Government came very late to a sensible approach to covid. But they should be praised for getting there in the end. And these figures vindicate that approach.
And there’s a reason, by the way, that we vape blueberry and strawberry and mint and lemon flavoured e-cigarettes.
Irish Water, while we’re on the subject, are very proud of their own performance. At least, if we judge it on the bonuses paid out for performance last year:
The Government’s biggest remaining strength is that it remains the only viable alternative in the public mind to Sinn Fein and Sinn Fein’s “radical change”. But it is not loved, for that. It is resented.
“It is incompetence of the highest degree. It is Government by the cast of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em.”
Since November of 1990 the Conservative and Unionist party has been searching its ranks for the reincarnation of Mrs. Thatcher.
A decade ago, the idea that we might ever effectively mandate vaccination and lock the great unwashed out of society would have been universally regarded as extreme.