Obviously, he’s not literally a Protestant. You’d hope they’d have noticed that when they interviewed him for the job. But judging by this interview he gave to the Irish Times last week, he’s more a Henry VIII loyalist than a Thomas More man: Dublin’s Catholic archbishop-elect Dermot Farrell has said he would like to see […]
This is now the fourth draft of this article. It is the fourth draft, because in the first three drafts, I had to be very careful what I said. That is because, in this new world that’s emerged over the weekend, you have to be very conscious, on the right, that you’re arguing with one […]
Paul Murphy TD has been remarkably consistent in demanding more and more Covid restrictions. So much so, in fact, that on Saturday, he approvingly retweeted an Irish Times article which described him as “the Dáil’s most consistent advocate of a zero covid strategy”. Here he is, basking in the acclaim, and criticising the Government for […]
The concerning thing here is not the number of people in hospital, actually. 1,100 patients is a lot, but a modern first world health service should be able to cope with that. No, the concerning thing is this graph: 151 admissions in the past 24 hours, and the rate increasing at more than 100 a […]
There are a number of things that are remarkable about this tweet from the Chinese Embassy in Washington. The first, though, is that it’s still up, unmolested by twitter, with no warning, or clarification attached. President Trump gets banned for dopey tweets about how he didn’t really lose the election. China, on the other hand, […]
At approximately this time yesterday morning, the question of “what to do about the schools” was remarkably uncontroversial, as these things go. In the face of an explosion in the number of cases, hospital admissions, and ICU admissions on foot of covid, the country had basically made peace with the fact that schools would not […]
Watching the highly disturbing footage from Washington DC, last night, my mind kept going back to the autumn of 2018. On October 4th, of that year, the US Senate was engaged in a confirmation hearing for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh had been accused, you’ll recall, of sexually assaulting a high school […]
Current mood: Extreme jealousy: The latest addition to Britain’s array of 24-hour news channels is to begin recruiting more than 100 journalists after completing a £60m fundraising that it claims was significantly oversubscribed. GB News, which aims to launch later this year, said on Wednesday that Sir Paul Marshall, a prominent hedge fund manager, and […]
The happiest man in America today? Joe Biden. At the time of writing, only one of the two US Senate Elections in the state of Georgia has been officially called, with Democrat Raphael Warnock unseating Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. The other race, featuring Democrat John Ossoff against Republican Senator David Purdue, has not been officially […]
Barring some extraordinary reversal of the mood music in recent days, the Government will formally decide later today to close primary and secondary schools across Ireland until at least the end of January. The earliest possible date for school re-opening, then, is Monday February 1st. This would mean that three and a half weeks (including […]
Some of you may be familiar with the internet phenomenon of recent years whereby people, seeking to make some form of political point, choose to put hilariously implausible words in the mouths of their small children. Usually, in these stories, the children are implausibly eloquent, extraordinarily concerned about political issues, and coincidentally, hold the exact […]
We have incitement to hatred legislation in Ireland. If what has happened in the past few days is not incitement to hatred, then what is? When you tell a community that they are victims of institutional racism, without any evidence; when you tell a community that one of their members was murdered, without any evidence; […]