For months now, we have been living under the fog of a pandemic that seems to stick worse than chewing gum in curly hair. We have seen livelihoods lost through business closures that simply cannot afford to reopen, couples forced to stay apart due to the ever changing safety guidelines of air travel, and the […]
There are different ways in which people choose to interpret the Covid-19 pandemic. Is it simply another epidemiological “event” – one that was an inevitable eventuality of our globalized world? Or is it a pandemic which we signally failed to anticipate because of ‘bias’ in our thinking and policy making – the kind of bias […]
Speaking across the Dáil chamber in 1962, the formidable TD John McQuillan described the Minister for Justice, Charlie Haughey, as someone who was “unhelped, unprotected and unloved.” Even at this early stage, it is a political characterisation that could be easily and fairly applied to the current government. Unhelped by a series of self-imposed gaffes […]
Tom Mitchell who died on July 22 just short of his 89th birthday was twice elected as a Westminster MP while a republican prisoner, which I believe is a unique distinction. Mitchell was born in Dublin in 1931 and joined the Dublin Brigade of the IRA in the early 1950s. He took part in a […]
Kathy Sheridan, in yesterday’s Irish Times, sensitively engages with the issue of assisted suicide. She does so as someone who has been through the palliative care experience with her own departed husband. But she also specifically does so in light of the statement made by cervical cancer screening champion Vicky Phelan: “Allow me to die […]
Summer 2020 is another kind of new normal. There’s a strange feel to it like all the other resets since March 12th when the country went into indefinite lockdown. This is arguably one of the better parts of new normal The little fishing village of Ballycotton with its signature island and lighthouse has been on […]
More than eighty complaints, would you believe, led to the ad being banned. If you haven’t had the chance to see it, here’s the scandalous tampon ad that the advertising authority of Ireland don’t want you to see: Is it a bit crude? Sure. But it’s hardly an advert for some kind of sexual debauchery, […]
Deeply unfair, you’d have to say: A series of gaffes prior to and during the general election cost Fine Gael at the polls, a meeting of the parliamentary party has been told. Ministers and Ministers of State held discussions reviewing the party’s general election performance on Tuesday ahead of a further meeting of the entire […]
It seems like RTE has gone all 1968 on our ass. Not only have they guilt-bombed us now for months over our white supremacy and slavery associations, but now it seems the national broadcaster thinks that abolishing the police is something they should give a “platform” to. On Tuesday, the national broadcaster posted a piece […]
For most Irish people, child benefit is sacrosanct and should not be interfered with. Many families rely on the monthly payment to pay for basic costs, and, since the state has long-since scrapped child tax credits, child benefit has long been viewed as an essential contribution to the significant cost to families of rearing the […]
Polling over the last few months in the US election has been fairly consistent: Donald Trump’s goose is well and truly cooked. It’s not just one pollster either – it’s been all of them. An approval rating stuck in the very low forties, and states like Texas and Georgia, which have always been rock solid […]
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the removal of statues being an assault on our history, and the decision of the Shelbourne Hotel to remove, yesterday, four statues that had adorned its exterior walls for a century and a half is interesting, in that context: The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin has taken down […]