There are days, watching the Irish Government’s response to Coronavirus, where you start to feel relatively confident in it for a while. Then something like this happens: Department of Health has said that general visiting restrictions that some hospitals & nursing homes have introduced, should be lifted. The National Public Health Emergency Team has not […]
It’s important to start this piece with the official advice: Buying overpriced facemasks probably isn’t going to save you from the Coronavirus, according to the experts: “It seems kind of intuitively obvious that if you put something—whether it’s a scarf or a mask—in front of your nose and mouth, that will filter out some of […]
To be fair, my headline is technically inaccurate, but it’s true for all intents and purposes. Israel’s newly re-elected Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, announced yesterday that henceforth, all visitors to Israel would have to go into quarantine for fourteen days. Going into quarantine for two weeks makes most business or leisure travel impracticable, of course. […]
An interesting report this morning from TheJournal.ie: THE NUMBER OF people deported from Ireland last year who were here illegally or who had failed in their asylum application rose significantly to 293. That was almost as many deportations as had taken place in the previous two years, when 140 (2017) and 163 (2018) people were […]
It’s very easy to write about how the Irish Government is bungling the Coronavirus crisis (for it is, now, a crisis) by not moving quickly enough to restrict public gatherings and enforce strict containment measures, and to list the many ways in which it is failing to do so. Primarily, it’s easy to write because […]
Things looked very bad for the old Arctic Sea Ice back in 2007. If you don’t remember, that was the year that Al Gore won the nobel prize for his important work in highlighting the plight of the poor Polar Bear, which was, he said, doomed to live in a virtually ice-free arctic circle by […]
The chances of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and Sinn Fein coming together to form a national government are, let’s face it, almost zero, for the simple reason that politicians probably feel that it would probably disadvantage all three parties. But that may well be wrong, and, more importantly, leaving the politics out of it, there’s […]
There are basically two competing approaches to thinking about the Coronavirus: The first is popular with many policymakers and media observers, and it is to basically accept that the virus is now out of control globally, that most of us will probably get it and survive, and that it’s just a fact of life that […]
Poor Pope Francis has had something of a torrid week of it. It began with the announcement that the Pontiff has been struck down by a mystery illness and was confined to bed. It approaches its end with an unwelcome letter in the post from Ireland’s most high profile Catholic. Of course, it seems fairly […]
It’s perfectly understandable if you missed it, because, let’s face it, the news is Coronavirus 24/7 these days, but on Monday the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) released data on new car sales for the first two months of 2020. The figures were, well, not good: New car registrations for February were down […]
Next Monday, the Global Alcohol Policy Convention will hold its annual conference in Dublin Castle, organised in partnership with the Department of Health. Over 1,000 people are expected to attend, from all parts of the world, including areas that are struggling and failing to contain the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak. The Department of Health are, at […]
The scale of the migrant crisis on the Greek border with Turkey is hard to put into context for an Irish audience. Already there are mumblings and grumblings of discontent in Ireland about the number of Asylum seekers, and controversy about their housing. 10,000 homeless people, when the country hit that milestone figure, was regarded […]