Recently, it’s felt like Students’ Union leaderships are more concerned with political posturing and furthering their agendas than acting for the student body. This could not have been made clearer than from the recent exposés we have seen from The Burkean on USI and TCDSU officers. When I first arrived at University, I tried leaving […]
Irish Ambassador to Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, penned a book with Dr. Oliver Johnson entitled ‘Getting to Zero (A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline). The title, as indicated, relates to getting to zero cases of Ebola at a single time, meaning when the last infected patient had […]
Beginning with denial and ending with acceptance, the five stages of grief proposed by Swiss-American psychologist Ellizabeth Kubler-Ross made her famous during her lifetime and even became a staple of popular culture. Sometimes one almost wonders, watching the Irish reaction to one event after another, whether she would have been tempted to slot ‘Brit-bashing’ somewhere […]
God bless Vanessa Hudgens. Right across the media people are looking for content that isn’t utterly depressing, or isn’t about the bloody so-called “curve”, or “social distancing”. And let me tell you, it’s a bleak, bleak landscape for content right now. And then along comes a good-looking Hollywood starlet to say something absolutely outrageous. It’s […]
Most of the praise for the Taoiseach’s well-delivered speech to the nation last night has focused on his reassuring tone and calm embodiment of national determination. Those things, are, of course, entirely subjective. For myself, I thought it was very good – his finest hour in fact, not that there’s much competition for that particular […]
There was undoubtedly more hardship to contend with then, from constant threat of pagan kings, to a creaking health system that relied more on nettles than morphine.
It is now readily acknowledged that China, through a series of unprecedented and restrictive public health and quarantine measures ‘bought the world some time’ in the global fight against Covid-19. Most of those actions would not have been possible in western democracies, relying as they did for their implementation on the authoritarian nature of the […]
In 1880 – 140 years ago – one of the most significant events in the social history took place on the estate of Lord Erne near Lough Mask in Mayo. It involved a campaign of social and economic ostracism – collective actions which have been known ever since by the name of Erne’s land agent […]
After a very sunny week, the weekend is rainy
For most normal people, the coronavirus pandemic is an obvious disaster. It threatens the lives and wellbeing of older people, makes travel more difficult, creates scarcity of resources, and is, at the very least, highly inconvenient, if not outright fatal for businesses and jobs. However, to radical green-types, Extinction Rebellion activists and Greta cultists, this […]
Just when many of us have become virtual prisoners in our own homes to help fight Covid-19, authorities have decided that they might start releasing actual prisoners from actual prisons during the crisis. First those with three and then those with six months left on their sentences would be released, say authorities, and maybe even […]
Some questions that we should ponder calmly when the pandemic has abated So far only about 6,500 people have died in the coronavirus pandemic. According to experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a worst-case scenario for the United States could be 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths. It’s all speculative, but whatever […]