The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. George Orwell, 1984 The recommendation of the National Council for Curriculum Assessment that the teaching of history remain an optional subject for the Junior Cert hardly came as a surprise. Anyone who read the 2016 NCCA background […]
Chronic loneliness is an increasing concern, and apparently not just among the elderly and social-media crazed millennials. A recently released YouGov survey finds that almost one in five men in the UK say that they have no close friends. The findings also show that men generally lead more solitary lives than women, who appear to be better at […]
Good news, folks. After what feels like a lifetime of waiting, a new, true, fully socialist Irish movement is here. Paul Murphy has finally stepped forward, to offer the people the revolutionary leadership we have all waited so many years for: “Speaking at the launch in Dublin today, Murphy said that after a year-long debate […]
A combination of anonymity, invulnerability, and defensiveness causes Twitter users to revert to a form of pre-civilization, in which kill-or-be-killed defines the conditions of exchange.
The Irish Medical Council has produced an updated version of the Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners. The most relevant changes follow the Ireland’s new abortion law. Let’s consider them in detail. Section 48 of the Guide was titled “Abortion” in the previous editions while now the euphemism “termination of pregnancy” is […]
When I was a child, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply that I wanted to be a zookeeper, or an airline pilot, or a racing driver. My love of animals and planes and fast cars has not abated, though sadly, I did not manage to […]
Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled this week that assisted suicide is legal if a person is experiencing “intolerable physical and psychological suffering”. Anyone who “facilitates the suicidal intention… of a patient kept alive by life-support treatments and suffering from an irreversible pathology” should not be punished, the court ruled. The patient’s condition must be “causing physical […]
Serious concerns have been raised about the implementation of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation after a 61-year-old depressed but otherwise healthy man was euthanised in the province of British Columbia. Alan Nichols, a former school janitor who lived alone and struggled with depression, was admitted to Chilliwack General Hospital, BC, in June after he was […]
One of the interesting and worrying trends in the USA at the moment is its political polarisation. This is of course not unique to that country, but there is some evidence that the political divide is becoming increasingly reflected in an economic and geographic one. That is, people are becoming less likely to be living […]
The Government has announced ‘stringent new building regulations’ which will drive up the cost of new builds and renovations of existing builds. Under the new regulations all new builds will have to have an A2 energy rating and be ‘near-zero energy buildings’, and existing builds, undergoing major renovations, will have to be brought up to […]
A funny thing about the way the Irish media conducts its business is that it is perfectly capable of talking about two separate issues without ever allowing a connection to be drawn between the two, in case people might draw the right wrong conclusions. In Ireland now, the media is completely convinced of two things: […]
In the wave of disgust, horror and revulsion which has cascaded over us with the revelations of the barbaric treatment of Kevin Lunney (earlier this month), angry questions come spontaneously into our mind. Among those are questions about the very humanity of the perpetrators. We also ask what kind of punishment is appropriate for those […]