Imagine as a restaurant owner, being told that your struggling business cannot open for indoor dining for weeks, while top civil servants get pay increases – and then hearing the phrase “we’re all in this together.” You could almost feel yourself turning into Michael Douglas from Falling Down in real time. As reported in the […]
Hats off to the Government PR machine for releasing the second annual lot of abortion figures on the same day that they reversed course and announced that indoor pints would not, after all, be on the menu. One story dominated the news, the other didn’t get much of a mention. Had it gotten a mention, […]
The notion, still widely held, that Ireland will be able to return to normality without the mother and father of all battles, took a very big hit yesterday. In the face of all the available international evidence, the Irish Government instead decided to rely on a black box model from NPHET – which nobody can […]
The fourth season of the multiple award-winning series The Handmaid’s Tale recently commenced on SBS. Loosely based (by this season, at least) on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name, the series presents a dystopian picture of a country known as Gilead, based in the north-east of America and ruled by a patriarchal and totalitarian theocratic government. The premise is that […]
As the citizens of the Republic appear to be faced with another prolonged period of restrictions, with a few minor concessions thrown in as a distraction, some questions have been raised regarding the model which NPHET and therefor the state is basing its gloomy predictions on. That model is predicting a “worse case scenario” of […]
Question: What is the average age of members of the Dáil? The youngest TD is Fianna Fáil’s James O’Connor, who was elected at the absurd age of 22, and is the youngest by nearly a decade from the Social Democrat’s Holly McKeever-Cairns. The median TD, though, is well over 40, and probably closer to 50 […]
Revised rules about handling allegations of wrongdoing against clergy and others in the employment of the Catholic Church were published by the Vatican in June (New Book VI of the Code of Canon Law, 01.06.2021) and were generally received as a positive step towards holding offenders to more stringent account under a wide number of […]
Fianna Fáil byelection candidate Deirdre Conroy has admitted that her government essentially rubber stamps orders from NPHET when it comes to their covid response. Speaking on Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show, Conroy was pressed by Matt Cooper on the way her government has handled NPHET’s advice. “You seem to imply there that you regard NPHET […]
Sports journalist Ewan McKenna, responding to the latest Government leaks to the newspapers yesterday, which suggested that the July 5th date for indoor hospitality would be extended further, got pretty close to the truth of the matter with this tweet: This week – We can't reopen much for July. August – Schools going back so […]
When I was pregnant with my baby girl, Líadán, we were advised at a scan that there might be an issue and sent to Dublin to have her checked out. At 24 weeks gestation, she was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, the same condition that doctors mistakenly believed was the prognosis for Baby Christopher Kiely whose […]
Táinaiste Leo Varadkar and Taoiseach Micheál Martin have called for the AstraZeneca vaccine to be used on young people within weeks, despite the potential health risks, saying “it would be a shame not to use them.” I’m not sure that’s what you’d call the most rigorous medical reasoning to be honest. As it stands, adenovirus […]
The Road Safety Authority has been accused of victim-blaming by hosting a campaign to encourage cyclists and pedestrians to wear hi-vis gear when out on the road. According to the Irish Independent, the agency said that it had received 25 formal complaints about its Seatbelt Sheriff and Hi-Glo Silver campaigns, with complainants claiming the campaign […]