In the midst of a housing crisis that dominated the General Election earlier this year, and in a country with – at last count – ten thousand homeless people, Dublin City Council was last night presented with a plan to build 850 new homes in Coolock. 250 of these would have been social housing. The […]
A Universal Basic Income, for those of you who don’t know, is a policy idea which would see the Government giving everybody in the country a guaranteed baseline amount of money every month, regardless of their financial circumstances. No matter who you are, you get a fixed amount of income every month from the Government. […]
On Friday, we reported on the contents of Fianna Fáil’s new Hate Crime Bill, which will be debated in the Seanad this week. Ahead of that debate, it is worth setting out for our readers why we at Gript believe hate crime laws are one of the worst ideas ever introduced by Irish politicians. Here […]
The new Hate Crime Bill, introduced by Senators Lisa Chambers, Fiona O’Loughlin, and Robbie Gallagher last week is a remarkably poor piece of legislation. You can read it all here. The bill creates a new offence of “aggravated hate crime”. What it essentially tries to do is to tack motive onto existing crimes as an […]
Fascinating: Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020 Critics of the Covid lockdown have been making the point for some weeks now […]
The television licence, as regular readers will know, goes almost in its entirety to RTE, with a small amount set aside for TG4 and Irish language programming. It’s also an absolute abomination. And it seems that a lot of Irish people have come to the same conclusion: THE “BROKEN” TV licence system is costing about […]
Let’s face it: In one, very limited respect, this isn’t the worst idea in the world. January is everyone’s least favourite month, right? Maybe if we move Christmas, we can retain all the festive cheer of December, but keep the mince pies and mulled wine and Mariah Carey singing inappropriate lines about Santa Claus until […]
In the week since American voters went to the polls, most things about the result have become clear, and a few things remain outstanding. Joe Biden has been declared, by the media, Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, to be the President-Elect. He has spent the last few days beginning to assemble an administration, […]
It is very unusual for the Ceann Comhairle of the Dáil to make any interventions whatever in political matters, given that the chair is generally sworn to neutrality. Which makes this one, then, all the more notable: Ceann Comhairle Sean Ó Fearghaíl said he was refusing to allow debates on an “inordinate number of complaints […]
The figures in relation to elder abuse, released yesterday by the HSE, are simply astonishing. Here’s Newstalk with a summary: The health service’s National Safeguarding Office received almost 12,000 ‘concerns’ of abuse of vulnerable people last year. Some 3,337 related to adults over 65-years-of-age – a 9% increase on the year before. One third (33%) […]
The publication, last evening, of letters between the Chief Justice, Frank Clarke, and Mr. Justice Seamus Woulfe, in which Clarke tells Woulfe that, in his opinion, Woulfe should resign, have caused a major political headache for the Government. On the one hand, the politics of this situation are fairly straightforward: Woulfe is a villain, who […]
To be fair, they didn’t say the first bit. But it’s hard to argue that politics didn’t influence the timing, for reasons we’ll come to shortly. But first, the news: As I type these words, stock markets are surging globally. And why wouldn’t they? A 90% effective Coronavirus vaccine means, well, the end of the […]