“Where the offence is at the lower level of seriousness, there is no suggestion of sharing or distributing images, the accused is co-operative and it is a first offence, the option of a suspended sentence should at least be considered”.
You cannot create an office of President, fill it with a capable politician – which Von Der Leyen is – and then expect a different result.
If the courts start making decisions – as they were urged to do in this instance – based on how the climate in the country might be affected by those decisions, then they are no longer impartial judicial actors, but political actors.
We got a Government and a society that is both institutionally incompetent on the big problems, and institutionally tyrannical on the small stuff.
The stunning thing here, really, is that the polling consistently now has Sinn Fein on course to lose seats, rather than gain them, at the next election.
London’s demographics, a new book you should read; the Irish soccer mess, and why Gript won’t stop asking about the Bike Shed.
Before the debate, all of the fundamentals pointed to a very tight election decided by a handful of votes in a few states. After the debate, that remains the case.
The budget surplus for this one year alone in Ireland was projected by the Minister for Finance in April to be in the order of €8billion.
Only a fool meddles with a system that is producing good outcomes
If one candidate wins it bigly, then the other will obviously demand more debates, but the victor will have no incentive whatsoever to agree to them.
If it’s just another political memoir about climbing the greasy pole and getting bored once you reach the top, then we can toss it in the “I might read that later” column, with all the other political memoirs.
In modern democracies, political offices are just one of a whole series of interlocking institutions that wield political power. Capturing one of them is not enough. There are no shortcuts.