Watching the British Labour Party general election campaign has been, on the whole, a depressing affair. The Party has taken a momentous decision, on Brexit, to enter a General Election with a promise to have no fixed policy at all, and to make up its mind later. It decided at its annual conference six weeks […]
This week, police in Hong Kong increased their brutal and often violent treatment of pro-democracy protesters. Yet this is what Sky News reported. And CNBC And Al Jazeera Carrie Lam is the chief executive of Hong Kong and a tool of the repressive Chinese government, who have abused the human rights […]
Sentencing in Ireland is, not to put too fine a point on it, a sick joke: “A father who raped his adult special needs daughter while her mother was terminally ill in hospital has been jailed for seven years. The 66-year-old Munster man, who cannot be identified in order to protect his daughter’s identity, pleaded […]
The harrowing media reports detailing the brutal, senseless murder of Ana Kriégel make for very difficult reading. The thought of one of our own children being caught in that indescribably horrific situation is unimaginable. Ana was only 14 when she was killed, and the manner in which she died is the stuff of nightmares. […]
As we discussed last week, the challenge of a declining Russia is one of the stories of the 21st geopolitical century. But directly to Russia’s west is another area of the world that is suffering demographic decline: East and Central Europe. Many of these countries’ demographic woes we have discussed before, but we have not really […]
As more than 600,000 people in Dublin, Kildare and Meath face at least another four days without domestic drinking water we can apparently look forward to this becoming a regular occurrence. Apart from illustrating once more the disaster that is Irish Water, it is perhaps a timely forewarning of what is coming down the tracks […]
25-year-old New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick has won fame on social media after this week dismissing an elderly Parliamentary heckler with the ‘viral quip, “OK boomer’”; the derogatory expression, ‘which refers to the baby-boomer generation’, has ‘gained popularity among young people on social media in recent months as a way of brushing off the views […]
If you lived through it, you’d have to have been an apathetic stoic with no soul, not to shed a tear at the sight of East Germans flooding into West Berlin on the night of November 9th, 1989. As a (half) native German, it was pivotal moment in my motherland’s history and one I remember […]
Former President Barack Obama last week launched a scathing attack, during an interview on youth activism, on the smug, judgmental attitude of people under the spell of “woke” culture. Obama was responding to the increasing trend of using social media to express outrage, disgust, and moral disapproval toward language and behaviour that is not politically […]
Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan has launched a new public consultation on hate speech with the clear aim of implementing new, stricter laws around hateful speech which he said with certainty on Drivetime RTE a few days ago, “is becoming common in Ireland”. But, is it? Searching for stats on hate crimes in Ireland is surprisingly […]
Mary McAleese in her contribution to a Trinity College conference entitled ‘Women the Vatican Couldn’t Silence’ read from a book by Pope John Paul II, ‘Love and Responsibility’. The book was written by the late Pope in 1960, and was a lengthy treatise on the nature of spousal love that focused on mutual self-giving, consideration […]
Over the years Kanye West proved he was no stranger to public vulgarity. Obscene lyrics and lewd displays were part and parcel of everything he did, from his overly-sexualised music videos, to his open discussion of his favourite porn categories, and even his marriage to Kim Kardashian, whose career was arguably jump-started by her notorious […]