This time last year, if someone had told me that I would soon see a pandemic sweep through the world, that I myself, and several of my friends, would contract the virus, and that citizens would be instructed to stay at home for weeks on end, with the exception of essential trips to the supermarket […]
An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has indicated that he no longer thinks that Ireland will reach the 15,000 cases of Covid-19 virus infections by the end of March. Now two weeks since the first restrictions were announced in Ireland and with further stricter restrictions announced, without risking accusations of complacency, it appears that Ireland Inc. has […]
If you’ve glanced at social media at any point in the last few weeks, there’s a high chance you’ve seen words to the effect of: “Don’t worry about covid-19 – it only affects old people.” Aside from the fact that this is medically untrue (there are plenty of young people with pre-existing conditions at risk […]
In the midst of a global pandemic, and at a time when every effort is being made to protect human life, abortion campaigners in Northern Ireland are using the widespread alarm to promote abortion. Despite abortion having nothing at all to do with coronavirus, or healthcare for that matter, abortion providers and ‘abortion rights’ organisations […]
It’s an interesting little footnote to history that while the phrase “never let a good crisis go to waste” is nearly always attributed to Winston Churchill, there’s no actual evidence that he ever said it. He may well have said it, but nobody can ever seem to record when, or where, or to whom. In […]
An incisive observation from Robert Burke on the twitter machine, here: https://twitter.com/robertburke84/status/1242750630592229376 He’s both right that the Irish Government has done a complete one hundred and eighty degree u-turn on testing in the space of seven days, and that the rest of the media seems unwilling to question it. More on the latter point in […]
Coronavirus is not the flu. It’s much more infectious.
There’s a sense in the country, and in the wider world, at the moment, that this is the time for everyone to pull together, and that old divisions don’t really matter in the face of a genuinely existential threat to human life. In so far as possible, therefore, we’ve tried not to dole out any […]
In an interview, Sir David Attenborough says the Corona virus is not the worst danger we face, but the state of the environment: ‘Even the worst outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic are nothing on the scale of what is eventually feared will be the catastrophic implications of climate change’ (Joe Shute, “‘This will be serious, […]
Niamh wrote something of a polemic on this site last week about that god-awful “celebrities singing Imagine by John Lennon” video, declaring that “the level of self-awareness (in the video) is between zero and minus infinity”. Well Niamh, I have some bad news. Just take a look. https://twitter.com/Madonna/status/1241768707631841281 Where’s it all going to end? If […]
An Argentine court has upheld the criminal conviction of a gynaecologist who refused to abort the child of a rape victim in 2017. Dr Leandro Rodriguez Lastra was sentenced to a 14-month suspended jail term, plus 28 months of disqualification from holding public office. Dr Rodriguez Lastro will appeal. The victim was a 19-year-old in her fifth […]
There are two ways of looking at these numbers: “There are now about 40,000 people in Ireland waiting for a test for the coronavirus, the HSE has said. At a briefing on Sunday the HSE’s chief operations officer, Anne O’Connor, said the average waiting period for a test was four to five days. However, she […]