A powerful interview on the steps of the criminal courts, yesterday afternoon, after former Terenure College Rugby Coach, John McClean, was sent to prison for eight years. Damien Hetherington, one of his victims, was in court to hear the verdict, and stepped in front of the cameras when it was all over. The whole thing […]
Illegal drug use is the scourge of cities, towns and rural villages right across the state. Gone are the days when the problem was confined to major urban areas. In fact, nowadays hard-core drug use is approaching something like routine. It is also the source of endless heartbreak for families, parents and children whose […]
It’s really awe-inspiring how so many of Ireland’s most beautiful churches and religious houses were built so soon after the devastation of The Great Famine in the 1840s. St Mel’s in Longford was completed in 1856, St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin underwent a major renovation in 1864, and the Redemptorist church in Limerick was built […]
If you’ve never seen it, then bear with me, but one of the most striking scenes in David Lean’s dramatization of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is when the title character arrives back in Moscow from the war, and discovers that the local reds have taken over his home and are busily stealing everything in it. Even […]
My colleague Gary Kavanagh popped this into our Gript group chat yesterday evening with a three word comment that bears repeating – “Hearts and Minds”: It’s okay not to attend a wake, funeral service, burial or cremation these days because only 10 mourners are allowed due to COVID-19 restrictions. There are other ways to sympathise […]
“I’m a hostage, and this villa has been converted into a jail, all the windows are barred shut.” “I was told I would never see the sun again”. Last night, BBC’s Panorama aired a disturbing programme featuring the secretly-recorded video messages from Princess Latifa Al Maktoum, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed, to her friends, explaining that she […]
“Endless Russophobia”, she says, stalks the halls of the European Parliament in Brussels. More on that in a moment. But first, watch the whole thing, and pay close attention to what she says about Putin’s recently imprisoned political foe, Alexei Navalny: Is Navalny, as she says, a “vicious, anti-immigrant, racist”? Well, on the […]
A bit of a hangover from yesterday, which we didn’t get around to, but worth writing about anyway. Honestly, Mary, you’d be so much happier if you just left the Church and became a Protestant. Or a Muslim. Or a Hindu. Literally anything really. Why is she doing this to herself? The Catholic Church’s failure […]
‘It’s not the end of the world… It’s only three hours on the plane’ I remember myself telling my parents when I started thinking of moving to Ireland. I have always wanted to live here, ever since I was seven years old and heard for the first time Sinead O’Connor singing on the LP my […]
If you are one of the ‘too Irish’ citizens of this “ethnostate” then perhaps you might do well to give the Irish National Integration Conference a miss. It is running all week from Monday to Thursday and the organisers in the Immigrant Council of Ireland have been kind enough to place the proceedings on their site if […]
At the first conference of Stakhanovites in November 1935, Stalin declared to his audience that “Life has improved, Comrades. Life has become more joyous.” For himself and the thieves, psychopaths and rapists in his inner circle, it certainly had. For the millions living in abject poverty and those struggling to survive the aftermath of the […]
If there is a word to sum up the political zeitgeist in Ireland over the past decade, it must surely be “compassion”. The 2010’s were the decade when official Ireland set out, flanked by an armada of well-funded NGO’s and supported by a media thirsty for change, to right the wrongs of the past. In […]