A combination of anonymity, invulnerability, and defensiveness causes Twitter users to revert to a form of pre-civilization, in which kill-or-be-killed defines the conditions of exchange.
The Irish Medical Council has produced an updated version of the Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners. The most relevant changes follow the Ireland’s new abortion law. Let’s consider them in detail. Section 48 of the Guide was titled “Abortion” in the previous editions while now the euphemism “termination of pregnancy” is […]
When I was a child, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply that I wanted to be a zookeeper, or an airline pilot, or a racing driver. My love of animals and planes and fast cars has not abated, though sadly, I did not manage to […]
A funny thing about the way the Irish media conducts its business is that it is perfectly capable of talking about two separate issues without ever allowing a connection to be drawn between the two, in case people might draw the right wrong conclusions. In Ireland now, the media is completely convinced of two things: […]
In the wave of disgust, horror and revulsion which has cascaded over us with the revelations of the barbaric treatment of Kevin Lunney (earlier this month), angry questions come spontaneously into our mind. Among those are questions about the very humanity of the perpetrators. We also ask what kind of punishment is appropriate for those […]
If you search the website of the Irish Times for the phrase “Peak Oil” you will find that it appears only once in 2019, in a motoring column, and only then as a throwaway comparison to the Chinese car industry. It is the first time the phrase has appeared in Ireland’s most august newspaper since […]
Drugs are not dangerous because they are illegal; they are illegal because they are dangerous. A child who reaches age 21 without smoking, misusing alcohol, or using illegal drugs is virtually certain to never do so. Today, most children don’t use illicit drugs, but all of them, particularly the poorest, are vulnerable to misuse and […]
It seems that the people of Oughterard in Galway are not for turning. Despite orders from Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan that they should ‘step back’ and let the government ride rough-shed over the concerns of the community, they continue to protest against the establishment of a direct provision centre they see as unworkable and inhumane. This issue […]
1971 was a key year in the struggle by the Catholic nationalist population of the North of Ireland for democratic rights. A moderate campaign for basic democratic provisions had begun in the early 1960s and grew to be a mass movement led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (founded in 1967). It had provoked […]
We’ve only got twelve years left folks. The Amazon is on fire, the polar bears are all dead, and we are doomed, totally doomed, without even a good steak to get us through the apocalypse. I don’t know really why you’re headed to work today, or why all those Irish Times columnists and Greenpeace activists […]
Senator Ivana Bacik has recently argued in a piece she called “The Catholic Church hasn’t gone away, you know” that what she calls a “secularist” approach to separation of Church and State would help to remedy a situation in which the Catholic Church in Ireland “influence(s) public policy” through its religious teachings, runs a “shadow […]
The 2017-2018 report from Planned Parenthood Federation of America shows that it conducted 332,757 abortions for the year ended June 30, 2018, an increase from 321,384 during the previous year. The Report also shows that its private contributions grew to $630.8 million, compared with $532.7 million the previous year. But did you know that our […]