A few days ago, Dr Michael Ryan of WHO singled out Sweden for praise for its handling of the covid19 crisis. This is significant because Sweden was being pilloried as arrogant at best, irresponsible at worst for its refusal to join most of rest of the world in state enforced lockdown. Sweden’s extensive testing regime […]
‘Normal people’ should see the problem with licking faeces, but maybe I am expecting too much of our health chiefs.
Back in the far-off days of pre-lockdown the mantra that was repeated to us in order to secure our compliance in one of the biggest voluntary surrenders of civil liberties in history was “flatten the curve”. The idea behind it was that we need to ensure that the infection spreads more slowly than it would […]
I don’t know Oliver Callan from Adam, and we’d probably disagree on many things, but he is a genuinely funny comedian. His political sketches are hilarious, and he’s a brilliant mimic, effortlessly taking off everyone from Mary-Lou McDonald to Brian Johnson and Leo Varadkar. Last week, however, he learned that criticising Leo Varadkar during a pandemic will […]
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the best and the worst in us; it has also shone a light on our contradictions. Coming up with a vaccine may be the solution; but that’s still several months away, too long to wait out in a lockdown as many countries have been for almost two months now, with […]
Gavi, the vaccine alliance, founded and funded largely by Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, is an appealing option for Governments looking to make donations, according to a paper published in Global Public Health in 2014, because “it can often produce quantified, politically-appealing, easy-to-explain results within an election cycle, which is appealing to public-sector donors.” […]
Ireland is floating in and out of the Top Ten countries with the worst death rates per million, a fact largely attributable to how our caretaker government handled nursing homes.
The Green Party is a remarkably patrician outfit. Its elected representatives are invariably academics, lawyers or involved in “clean” enterprise. That is reflected in fact that their youth wing is almost exclusively based in the four main universities. The Young Greens, albeit with just one rep on the National Executive, will nonetheless play a key role […]
A month and a half ago I wrote that Ireland was not getting to zero anytime soon and that the exit strategy for the coronavirus pandemic in Ireland was not clear at all. Despite the government announcing a Roadmap for reopening society and business, and many hailing it is a providing light at the end […]
America’s a great country, but sometimes you really do wonder what’s going on: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine tells @MarthaRaddatz his statewide order mandating face masks be worn in stores went "too far." "It became clear to me that that was just a bridge too far. People were not going to accept the government telling them […]
This article is co-authored with Dara J Clooney Since the foundations of the state, our country has been ruled by two dominant parties. These parties are historically distinguishable only by their loyalty to two different men in the bitter division over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and many often say, Fine Gael and Fianna […]
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