While the Government decision to “postpone” re-opening of the hospitality sector was the talk of the country, where was the main “opposition” party? That would be Sinn Féin, in numbers at least. But the party whose press office is a veritable incontinent atm of statements on everything from how much people ought to stake on […]
Credit to TDs for extracting this fairly revealing statement from Ireland’s benevolent dictator. But let us face facts: When Holohan says “September or beyond”, he means “or beyond”: NPHET would have recommended keeping pubs and restaurants closed for indoor dining until the “end of September or beyond” had they not proposed a vaccine pass, the […]
Mandatory Hotel Quarantine was introduced in Ireland at the start of 2021 as part of a Government strategy to help get the country back to normal. Six months on, the policy has completely failed, because Ireland remains the most restricted country in Europe. The policy was introduced, let us not forget, on the basis of […]
China So here we are heading into July 2021 and much of our Irish summer so far has been dismal. I gave up on hope for our Irish weather and built myself a greenhouse. Today I was planting my tomatoes as I thought about China and grumbled about the price of wood to build said greenhouse. […]
The broadcasting regulator has found that two programmes broadcast by Newstalk FM breached the Broadcasting Code in relation to impartiality because the presenters expressed their own views and advocated a partisan position on abortion. The Newstalk Breakfast show breached the broadcasting code, when presenter Ciara Kelly expressed strong support for abortion provision, the regulator found. “I would […]
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 […]