Brian Hayes, for those of you who have, perfectly understandably, forgotten, served as Minister of State at the Department of Finance from 2011 to 2014. He then headed off to Brussels for five years, where he served as an MEP, before choosing to retire from politics earlier this year and take a job as CEO […]
As far as we know, the idea of “fact checking” was invented a few years ago, as a way to find jobs for those annoying people you meet at a party, or down the pub who have to butt into every conversation with “well, actually….”. Jokes aside, the concept is very simple. You take a […]
The Department of Social Protection has told this website that a software failure following an upgrade to its systems last week will be resolved today, and will not impact payments to customers. However, staff working on the front line have challenged this, and said that the situation has created a “crisis”. They say they have […]
To cut a long story short, the banks are charging people hundreds of thousands of euros more than they should be. Shawn Pogatchnik has the scoop: “Banks are hitting many mortgage holders with double the interest rate they need to be profitable, the Central Bank has warned in a stinging rebuke to lenders’ claims of […]
Watching the British Labour Party general election campaign has been, on the whole, a depressing affair. The Party has taken a momentous decision, on Brexit, to enter a General Election with a promise to have no fixed policy at all, and to make up its mind later. It decided at its annual conference six weeks […]
Noel Grealish TD was in the wars again yesterday over immigration. This time, he was accused of racism for asking the Taoiseach at leaders questions about the amount of money leaving Ireland in “remittances” to Nigeria. A remittance is money sent home by an emigrant. For many years, for example, Irish families benefitted from money […]
Sentencing in Ireland is, not to put too fine a point on it, a sick joke: “A father who raped his adult special needs daughter while her mother was terminally ill in hospital has been jailed for seven years. The 66-year-old Munster man, who cannot be identified in order to protect his daughter’s identity, pleaded […]
It’s been a rough morning for Fianna Fáil’s by-election candidate in Dublin Fingal, Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee. After this website revealed on Saturday evening that the Senator had sent a number of openly racist tweets, she found herself on the front page of the Irish Independent this morning, claiming amongst other things that she had been […]
Fianna Fáil by-election candidate, Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee complained in 2011 that she had to sit beside a “black, Brazilian dwarf” on a Dublin Bus journey. Several tweets have emerged from Senator Clifford-Lee, dating to 2011 and 2012, and have been circulated on twitter by political opponents. Several of these tweets refer to travellers in particular, […]
Alright, alright. The jokes and the sneers kind of write themselves, don’t they? When Harry Potter star Emma Watson says that she is “self-partnered”, the first thing that comes to mind is “why didn’t she just say “single”?” There’s also a very easy argument to be made that describing oneself as “self-partnered” is a perfect […]
Another tale of happy, modern Ireland, brought to you by the Government’s Health Research Board (HRB): “The latest drug treatment figures from the Health Research Board (HRB) show a 50% increase in the number of cases presenting for cocaine treatment between 2017 and 2018. While opiates remain the most common drug reported among cases treated […]
A fascinating tidbit this, unearthed by a friend on twitter: https://twitter.com/scary_biscuits/status/1191868187027148800 The most popular story in the mythology of modern Ireland is the notion that our little country has recently stepped forward, out of the darkness and brutality of the past, to become a happier and more self-confident nation. Nearly everything written about the Ireland […]