Present-day society has developed a disturbing ambivalence to suicide – on the one hand, abhorring it as a tragedy and calling for preventative measures; on the other, promoting it by the legalisation of euthanasia. Gary Furnell, whose work for a funeral director has exposed him to the frequency of suicides, especially of young men, looks to […]
Governments love to talk up renewable energy, describing it as green and low-carbon and the way of the future. They pump huge amounts of funding into it, and, in this country, are shutting down peat production and promising to leave carbon fuels like oil and gas in the ground, because they claim energy from wind […]
Social media platforms hold enormous potential to liberate ideas and information from the grips of national governments and media conglomerates. After all, ideas and arguments may now be publicised by just about anyone who is computer literate enough to open a Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube account. But the heavy-handed regulation of social media content by […]
The great paradox of modern Ireland is that the more power Irish liberals acquire, the more illiberal they become. We had, yesterday, a collection of taxpayer funded NGO’s in to visit the Oireachtas committee on Housing and Local Government, which is responsible for how Ireland runs its elections, amongst other things. Kitty Holland picks up […]
Ten days ago, panicked by scenes of revelry in Dublin’s South William Street area, the Chief Medical Officer, Tony Holohan, sent the tweet heard around the country: Drove into Dublin City Centre to collect someone from work at 815 PM. Absolutely shocked at scenes in South Great George’s St, Exchequer St, South William St area. […]
“We don’t understand why you boo”.
The Special Criminal Court is back in the news, because an interim report into it is being published in a couple of weeks. We can say something with absolute certainty right now about that interim report: It will make absolutely no difference. Regardless of what the report says, the court will stay. The court will […]
We’re not supposed to call it the “Indian variant”, any more, obviously, in case that makes ordinary people feel suspicious of Indian-looking people they see on the street (who comes up with this stuff, exactly?). But we are all supposed to be absolutely terrified of it. It is more transmissible, and it is on the […]
The political correspondent for the Sunday Independent, Hugh O’Connell, had an article in Sunday’s edition titled ‘Religious orders stall on joining redress scheme.’ The sub-heading of the article is ‘Mother and baby home survivors wait as negotiations continue with Government.’ Let us take a critical look at those claims in more detail, because the best […]
The claim that all improvements in living conditions are illusionary distractions was pioneered first by Lenin in What is to be Done? and updated as part of new left ideology in the 1960s by Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Marxism. It still forms the basis of current identity politics in which the traditional working […]
In February, 12 large Canadian companies joined forces to trial mass rapid testing in their workplaces as a potential route to the reopening of their business. In March, 5,000 people attended an indoor concert in Barcelona with the help of rapid antigen tests and only two infections were traced to the event. Universities in the […]
This week has seen extraordinary and unsettling scenes across Dublin city, as Gardaí drew batons to clear young drinkers off South William Street, and clamped down on other parts of the city. Apparently groups of young people were forced to leave St Stephen’s Green and other areas, so they all drifted down to South William […]