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 […]
To be fair to Amnesty Ireland, it’s possible that their very essence has never been more purely distilled than it is in a line in their latest video: “discrimination can be disguised as jokes or political opinion”: 5 ways you can call out racism related to the #coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/YS0YR9ha2K — Amnesty Ireland (@AmnestyIreland) March 12, […]
It’s been a rough few days to be a young, devastatingly handsome, Irish man, to be honest. First, they cancelled the formula one. Then they cancelled the football. Now they’ve cancelled the golf, with the Masters being called off. And now, from the Irish Times, comes the most devastating hammer blow of them all: Can […]
If you’re on social media, and you want to keep abreast of the news from the health service, it’s a very good idea to be following the Sunday Business Post’s health correspondent, Susan Mitchell, who can generally be trusted to provide you with the stark, blunt, news free of spin. Last night, she shared this […]
Here at Gript, we generally do our best to defend capitalism as, well, the least-worst way to organise a society. As in so many other areas of life, though, the people you defend don’t always make it easy. Here’s Jeremy Warner, writing in that (usually very fine) journal of British Conservatism, The Daily Telegraph: “Using […]
This morning, the Taoiseach and his Government announced a national shutdown of Schools and other public places for an initial period of two weeks, along with a nationwide programme of social distancing. It was the right call. But it’s worth asking: How long could this shutdown actually last? Does the Government have some benchmarks for […]
As I write this, two big pieces of news are filtering through from the world of sport: First, the Spanish equivalent of the Premiership, La Liga, has been suspended after Real Madrid players were quarantined. The news comes after a Juventus player in Italy, Daniele Ruggani, tested positive for the illness last night: LaLiga has […]
An interesting, even fun, conundrum for us all to ponder while we spend our days in Coronavirus induced isolation – is this card received by Newstalk’s Dr. Ciara Kelly yesterday creepy and sinister, or well-intentioned and nice? Is she over-reacting absurdly, or is she right to be a bit perturbed? https://twitter.com/ciarakellydoc/status/1237746828264771584 Let’s consider the evidence. […]
An interesting email into us yesterday from Hermann Kelly, leader of the Irish Freedom Party, raised the question of why the Taoiseach and the Government appear to be persistently providing false information about the amount of money the Government sends to the EU annually. Speaking in Trinity College last week, the Taoiseach gave his usual […]