As you may have heard, the new Secretary General of the Department of Health is to receive an annual salary of €292,000. This represents an increase of 40% from the previous salary for the position, which was a mere €211,000. The Government’s position is that the sum is necessary. If you pay peanuts, you get […]
The girls on Kevin Harty’s computer were mostly aged between eight years old, and sixteen years old. Some were nine. Some ten. Some eleven. One of the girls on his computer was a baby, aged between one and two. Thankfully, the court was spared the details of exactly what was being done to the children […]
On Friday last, January 29, the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair (CDC) for Fianna Fáil in East Meath, held a special meeting at which it decided to suspend the Public Relations Officer, John Kierans for stating that he had put a motion down for the next ordinary meeting of the CDC regarding the Covid panic. According to […]
A total of 1,543 people have reportedly died of covid-19 in Irish nursing homes, with 369 of those having occurred in just the month of January 2021. The rate of outbreaks in nursing homes jumped five fold between mid-December and the end of January, with 4,300 positive cases detected in homes last month, which led […]
Millions of people living in India live in densely populated surroundings, with only limited access to clean water, and without the resources to ensure food and other hygiene. These conditions make people additionally susceptible to being infected with Covid -19 and India has recorded almost 11 million cases of the disease to date – or some 16% of […]
You’ve probably heard by now, at least in passing on the news, about the Military Coup in Myanmar that appears to have resulted in poor old Aung San Suu Kyi being locked up again. If you haven’t heard, here’s the BBC: Myanmar’s military has seized power after detaining Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically […]
On October 7th, last year, the Irish Times delivered its damning verdict on the British Government’s handling of Covid-19. “Fantasy as Policy”, it pronounced. “What is clear”, the paper said, “is that the British prime minister has not lost his capacity for nonsense – his speech was full of Churchillian bluster and exceptionalism about the […]
Countries across Europe saw anti-lockdown protests take place at the weekend with demonstrations in France, Spain, Italy Denmark amongst other nation states. In Denmark, protestors describing themselves as “Men in Black” protested in Aarhus, the country’s second largest city. The demonstrators chanted “Freedom for Denmar” and “We`ve had enough,” as they marched, claiming that the Covid-19 restrictions […]
Every once in a while, a bioethics article appears which is so powerful an indictment of injustice that it sends shivers up the spines of its readers. In 1949 Leo Alexander published “Medical Science under Dictatorship” in the New England Journal of Medicine, about Nazi medicine. In 1966 Henry K. Beecher published “Ethics and Clinical Research”, […]
After a long string of humiliations regarding vaccine supply, and then political chaos following the erection of a customs border on the island of Ireland, the EU has now desperately attempted to back-track by revoking Article 16. But is this really enough for the bloc to save face? The past few years have not been […]
Whenever you see something this tin-eared, there are really only two possibilities worth considering. The first is that the Labour Party, and its advisers, live in such a bubble that they genuinely don’t know how weird and odd it seems to normal people to assert that periods and menstruation are a gender-neutral experience. The second? […]
The headline most other media outlets seemed to take away from the Taoiseach’s comments yesterday was that lockdown would go on past March 5th. But that’s not really news, is it? Most of us had guessed that already. No, the far more significant news was in the small print: Micheál Martin said he did not […]