In his own way, Dwyer has done the rest of us a service here.
If the Government wanted to do a basic income pilot scheme, it could have picked many sectors of society. Why not single parents?
Perhaps that is because Eamon Ryan is something that Irish people are not used to: A politician who keeps his promises.
Moderation will always, by necessity, be subjective.
On all three metrics on which you might judge energy policy, then – cost, supply, and emissions – Ireland went backwards.
All of these indicators point in the same direction: This war will not, now, end quickly.
There’s a bit of carts and horses about this one.
Scotland – with masks – has many more cases per head of population than Ireland – without masks.
When you make things more expensive and more rare and more exclusive, you begin to have an inherent political appeal to snobs.
These have been long, dark, miserable years. Covid 19 bears much of the blame for that. As a society though, our own share of the blame is much, much, greater than we will ever admit to ourselves.
There are a couple of obvious problems with this, beyond the argument above that none of it is really necessary.
There are now only two possible outcomes: A negotiated settlement in which Ukraine retains its independence, and present government, or a long, drawn out, bloody war. Both outcomes will represent a humiliation for Moscow.