By “all” restrictions here, they really do mean “all” – no more facemasks, no more social distancing, no more restrictions on pubs and nightclubs and concerts or sporting events. When the Premier League returns after the ever-shorter football offseason, they’ll have full stadiums. The only remaining restrictions of any kind, it seems, will be some […]
Over the weekend, 140,000 fans poured into the Red Bull Ring, in Spielberg, Austria, to watch the Formula One Austrian Grand Prix. Tens of thousands watched England defeat Ukraine in Rome, in the European Championships. Across the continent, crowds poured into bars, restaurants, and sporting events. Meanwhile, in Ireland: A pilot music festival is taking […]
On Wednesday evening, Professor Philip Nolan, the NPHET scientist responsible for NPHET’s statistical model which predicted 700,000 cases of Covid-19’s Delta Variant in the event that the Government proceeded to re-open the economy as planned, composed a twitter thread outlining the figures. Amidst that thread, he included one of the most incredible statements made by […]
The last time I was involved in a car accident, it was November of 2015, and the main cause of the accident was that I left my wallet in my office and had to run back inside to get it. My now-wife and I were due, that evening, to have dinner in a nice restaurant. […]
Credit where it is due, Michael McDowell has never feared being unpopular. Which is just as well, because his article for the Irish Times yesterday asks some questions that will be unpopular with the Government: Practically no one has articulated the reservation that it may not make sense for Ireland to be in the frontline […]
Credit to TDs for extracting this fairly revealing statement from Ireland’s benevolent dictator. But let us face facts: When Holohan says “September or beyond”, he means “or beyond”: NPHET would have recommended keeping pubs and restaurants closed for indoor dining until the “end of September or beyond” had they not proposed a vaccine pass, the […]
Mandatory Hotel Quarantine was introduced in Ireland at the start of 2021 as part of a Government strategy to help get the country back to normal. Six months on, the policy has completely failed, because Ireland remains the most restricted country in Europe. The policy was introduced, let us not forget, on the basis of […]
Hats off to the Government PR machine for releasing the second annual lot of abortion figures on the same day that they reversed course and announced that indoor pints would not, after all, be on the menu. One story dominated the news, the other didn’t get much of a mention. Had it gotten a mention, […]
The notion, still widely held, that Ireland will be able to return to normality without the mother and father of all battles, took a very big hit yesterday. In the face of all the available international evidence, the Irish Government instead decided to rely on a black box model from NPHET – which nobody can […]
Question: What is the average age of members of the Dáil? The youngest TD is Fianna Fáil’s James O’Connor, who was elected at the absurd age of 22, and is the youngest by nearly a decade from the Social Democrat’s Holly McKeever-Cairns. The median TD, though, is well over 40, and probably closer to 50 […]
The Irish Government, via the Department of Health, has published a tender document seeking bidders to provide hotel rooms, transport, security, and healthcare monitoring for the purpose of providing mandatory hotel quarantine in Ireland into 2022, Gript can reveal. The existence of the tender suggests that, whatever it might say in public, the Irish Government […]
Naturally, no other Irish media outlet appears to have covered this story, because the only international comparisons that interest them are with the UK and the USA, and even then, only if those comparisons flatter Ireland. But it is important to note that Ireland’s approach to covid-19 is an outlier by international standards, and radically […]