Governments seldom fulfil promises made in pre election manifestos or even Programmes for Government. So the small and fractured Green Party can be happy that when it disappears again from public prominence, it will have left yet another toxic legacy as it did in 2011. For a party that only won 7% of the vote in the […]
A Universal Basic Income, for those of you who don’t know, is a policy idea which would see the Government giving everybody in the country a guaranteed baseline amount of money every month, regardless of their financial circumstances. No matter who you are, you get a fixed amount of income every month from the Government. […]
On Friday, we reported on the contents of Fianna Fáil’s new Hate Crime Bill, which will be debated in the Seanad this week. Ahead of that debate, it is worth setting out for our readers why we at Gript believe hate crime laws are one of the worst ideas ever introduced by Irish politicians. Here […]
As Ireland’s trading relationship with China continues to expand, so too does the interest of the Chinese Communist Party in using this as the basis for expanded political influence. Total bilateral trade between the two countries in 2019 was over $15 billion, with a balance of around $5 billion in Ireland’s favour. That in itself […]
A parliamentary question was recently submitted to the Health Minister by Carol Nolan TD who asked an important question concerning abortion and women’s health and safety . She wanted to know “the number of patients that received post termination of pregnancy care in maternity hospitals from January 2019 to date; the number of those that […]
The new Hate Crime Bill, introduced by Senators Lisa Chambers, Fiona O’Loughlin, and Robbie Gallagher last week is a remarkably poor piece of legislation. You can read it all here. The bill creates a new offence of “aggravated hate crime”. What it essentially tries to do is to tack motive onto existing crimes as an […]
Fascinating: Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020 Critics of the Covid lockdown have been making the point for some weeks now […]
When the oddly timed news broke last week that Pfizer was on the cusp of rolling out an effective vaccine for Covid-19, you could almost hear the great global cry of relief. At long last an end was in sight to the catastrophic health threats, stultifying boredom and economic paralysis that have plagued the world […]
The television licence, as regular readers will know, goes almost in its entirety to RTE, with a small amount set aside for TG4 and Irish language programming. It’s also an absolute abomination. And it seems that a lot of Irish people have come to the same conclusion: THE “BROKEN” TV licence system is costing about […]
Let’s face it: In one, very limited respect, this isn’t the worst idea in the world. January is everyone’s least favourite month, right? Maybe if we move Christmas, we can retain all the festive cheer of December, but keep the mince pies and mulled wine and Mariah Carey singing inappropriate lines about Santa Claus until […]
It is very unusual for the Ceann Comhairle of the Dáil to make any interventions whatever in political matters, given that the chair is generally sworn to neutrality. Which makes this one, then, all the more notable: Ceann Comhairle Sean Ó Fearghaíl said he was refusing to allow debates on an “inordinate number of complaints […]
The figures in relation to elder abuse, released yesterday by the HSE, are simply astonishing. Here’s Newstalk with a summary: The health service’s National Safeguarding Office received almost 12,000 ‘concerns’ of abuse of vulnerable people last year. Some 3,337 related to adults over 65-years-of-age – a 9% increase on the year before. One third (33%) […]