You always know it’s something he feels strongly about when the tweet appears in capital letters: WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, […]
Niamh wrote something of a polemic on this site last week about that god-awful “celebrities singing Imagine by John Lennon” video, declaring that “the level of self-awareness (in the video) is between zero and minus infinity”. Well Niamh, I have some bad news. Just take a look. https://twitter.com/Madonna/status/1241768707631841281 Where’s it all going to end? If […]
There are two ways of looking at these numbers: “There are now about 40,000 people in Ireland waiting for a test for the coronavirus, the HSE has said. At a briefing on Sunday the HSE’s chief operations officer, Anne O’Connor, said the average waiting period for a test was four to five days. However, she […]
Irish people will have let out a huge sigh of collective relief this afternoon with the news that, amidst the unprecedented crisis afflicting the country, our best and brightest were assembling in the national legislature to come up with ideas to mitigate the worst of it for the people. Until now, the Coronavirus epidemic has […]
A very interesting conversation on my twitter timeline this morning that’s worth exploring in more depth: One point that has received very little attention is the upcoming Seanad election and, in particular, the impact that it may have on the timing of the appointment of a Taoiseach and, as a result, the formation of a […]
It is universally accepted that the Coronavirus outbreak that has shut down the western world originated in the city of Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province. It is less universally, but still generally, accepted that the virus made its way into humans via an animal sold at one of that city’s disgusting wet markets – probably […]
She’s not the first doctor to get it, and she won’t be the last: Newstalk presenter Ciara Kelly has announced that she has been diagnosed with #COVID19. https://t.co/FCu7VkVqy8 — NewstalkFM (@NewstalkFM) March 18, 2020 For those of you who haven’t been in radio studios, this obviously raises concerns about Newstalk’s entire staff. Almost every programme […]
God bless Vanessa Hudgens. Right across the media people are looking for content that isn’t utterly depressing, or isn’t about the bloody so-called “curve”, or “social distancing”. And let me tell you, it’s a bleak, bleak landscape for content right now. And then along comes a good-looking Hollywood starlet to say something absolutely outrageous. It’s […]
Most of the praise for the Taoiseach’s well-delivered speech to the nation last night has focused on his reassuring tone and calm embodiment of national determination. Those things, are, of course, entirely subjective. For myself, I thought it was very good – his finest hour in fact, not that there’s much competition for that particular […]
It’s been a rough couple of days for the British Prime Minister. First, there was the unfortunate announcement from his Government’s scientific advisors that they had, erm, under-estimated the scale of the Coronavirus problem by a magnitude of thousands of potential deaths, because, well, they’d been modelling an entirely different disease: The UK only realised […]
For anyone interested, as softies like me are, in wildlife conservation and protection, the People’s Republic of China has long been the world’s greatest and most abominable villain. Nearly all of the poaching of endangered species in Africa, for example, is carried out to meet the demands of the Chinese market. Rhinoceros are regularly shot, […]
The bravery of Sinn Fein Senator Maire Devine shouldn’t be under-estimated here. She could easily have simply self-isolated with her family and watched the crisis evolve around her. Nobody’s going to blame anybody who just stays at home, watches Netflix, and does their part by social distancing. That is, after all, the whole point of […]