The International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) exists to hear appeals on the decisions of the International Protection Officer on applications for protection in the state. In plain English, it’s the body which decides whether an asylum seeker is properly entitled to asylum in the state. People appearing before it, then, have a right to expect […]
‘Clean’ energy may not turn out to be so clean A recent article by Maddie Stone at www.slate.com warns that in the next decade or three, the world will face a novel but entirely predictable problem: what to do with millions of square feet of worn-out solar panels. This problem is especially ironic because […]
It is remarkable what politicians and political campaigners can get away with, when journalists fail to call them to account – and nowhere is this more evident than around the issue of abortion. In the abortion referendum in 2018, pro-choice campaigners were allowed to create the impression that legalising abortion was a women’s health issue, […]
Advice from a business consultant about how to keep PC from taking root in corporate culture. This week the Goodyear Tire Company had a bad day. An employee at its Topeka factory leaked a photo of a diversity and inclusion slide which listed both acceptable clothing expressions — “Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Lesbian, Gay, […]
The Democrats virtual convention was a bit of a damp squib despite the effusive coverage not least from our own Brian O’Donovan the RTE correspondent in Washington who must be due a Consular post in Andorra or Tierra del Fuego if Biden wins. Just 6.1 million viewers bothered to tune into the TV coverage last Tuesday […]
Here in Ireland and across much of the Western world, the issue of mandatory masks has become a controversial and contentious issue, with many people being divided into “pro-mask” and “anti-mask” camps. The former argue that masks are akin to seatbelt laws – a necessary inconvenience for the common good to prevent the virus from […]
What is ‘Excess Deaths’? The Excess Deaths statistic estimates the total mortality impact of a disease on a society. Excess Deaths tells us how many people died in excess of the number we would normally have expected over the same time period. It’s like the ‘real’ metrics that remove the effect of inflation from the observed economic […]
The government has now introduced a return to many Covid-19 restrictions. But what do the numbers actually show about how deadly Coronavirus has been for Ireland? On July 3rd, the Health Information Quality Authority (HIQA) acknowledged that Coronavirus fatalities in Ireland were overestimated by 60%. A Central Statistics Office report published on the same day proved […]
Vice President Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States last night, and has now been formally ratified as President Trump’s opponent for the election, scheduled for November 3rd. Here are his full remarks: Biden promised that his first action if he is elected president will be to “get control of […]
They’ve all gone mad, haven’t they? Just think: there’s an alternative universe out there somewhere in which Fianna Fáil members had sense and told Micheál Martin that going into coalition was a dumb idea. In that universe, Dara Calleary is presently leader of Fianna Fáil, and leader of the opposition, watching his poll numbers grow […]
On Tuesday, the Irish government, at the recommendation of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), announced a series of new measures to limit the spread of Covid-19 and to minimize its impact on vulnerable groups. Few would dispute that Covid-19 poses a serious threat to our health and well-being, and that an intelligent and […]
In a combative RTÉ drivetime interview today, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has called on the Irish government to include countries like Germany and the UK in its “Green List” for international travel. “We’re talking about adding countries to Ireland’s Green List that have lower covid case rates than Ireland. You’re in greater danger of contracting […]