Kellyanne Conway, until recently Donald Trump’s senior counselor, should be a poster girl for ‘lean in’ feminism. She was the woman credited by Donald Trump (misogynist in chief to the feminist movement) as the main mover behind his system-rocking presidential victory in 2016. Not alone was she the first ever woman to successfully run an American […]
Identity politics is as much about the collapse of old identities as the forging of new ones. The current discussion about how the centenary anniversary of Ireland’s partition should be marked shows how radically political identities can be re-constructed over time. When Michéal Martin stood up in Dail Éireann about a year ago and declared […]
The problem with a charge of racism is that few people are prepared to challenge the strength of the evidence or the good faith of the party making the allegation. The media tend to report the incident in a way that is sympathetic to the ‘victim’. Sometimes, they make no pretence at all of sitting […]
Barclay’s Bank’s logo these days is printed in rainbow bands, indicating its full compliance with the demands of woke culture. But not just content to re-paint its old logo, Barclay’s is prepared quite literally, to put its money where its mouth is to prove its commitment to the cause. Specifically, it has closed the account […]
Summer 2020 is another kind of new normal. There’s a strange feel to it like all the other resets since March 12th when the country went into indefinite lockdown. This is arguably one of the better parts of new normal The little fishing village of Ballycotton with its signature island and lighthouse has been on […]
This week Fergus Finlay called those who attacked new Childrens’ Minister, Roderic O Gorman, because of the photo he posted of himself with controversial LGBT+activist, Peter Tatchell, as ‘rodents’ and ‘the most repellent form of political cave life’. Angry words for sure. Hateful, just as surely. But would they be indictable under new hate speech […]
‘Endorsement by association’, in the form of a photograph, taken at a book signing, next to a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan,’ I am a proud Islamaphobe’, was enough to rescind Cambridge University’s offer of a visiting fellowship to Dr Jordan Peterson. Dr Peterson was not given an opportunity to either clarify or […]
We already knew or should have known that we have the worst form of government ‘except for all the alternatives that have ever been tried’, as Winston Churchill put it. Sometimes it works better than other times. Sometimes, it is not the concept itself that is found wanting but the manner of its application. But […]
The aphorism ‘behind every fortune, there’s a crime’, has considerable truth, no doubt. The new sensitivities around bequests and bursaries of questionable provenance from the super wealthy of bygone ages has forced a rethink about honouring them in public memorials. It is indeed sobering to consider that grand foundations like universities may have been paid […]
‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’. The man or woman may be statesmanlike,out of their depth or just opportunistic. The Covid crisis has tested leadership around the world and the jury is still more or less out on who best rose to the challenge because the entity we were dealing with is still far from […]
Normal People, the serialization of the book by Sally Rooney, is billed as the great lockdown escape that has galvanized the country. According to RTE, that is scarcely open to argument and indeed many TV critics have gone along with the creators’ own assessment. According to the hype, it is a beautifully told, ‘coming of […]
It’s a time for questions; answers not so much. Some questions are personal and come more from a sense of entitlement than obvious deprivation. My version of the above might substitute Belgrade for Paris because I have two young grandchildren there and like many grandparents at this time, there is a sense, as weeks grow into […]