Somebody said to me yesterday that living in Ireland at the moment had pushed them to the point where they were wondering if they were the ones who had gone mad, and everybody else was still perfectly sane. “You start to ask yourself that”, this person said, “when nothing makes sense any more”. They were […]
This week, Gript’s #MyLockdown series will try to tell the stories of the people who have suffered the most over the past twelve months, in their own words. Submissions have been edited, in some places, for clarity of language, as well as spelling and grammar, but no content has been added. The stories are those […]
The question in the headline is not one which you really should be asking, in a modern western democracy, but asking it appears to be necessary. Consider this story from Chai Brady, a very good reporter with the Irish Catholic: A Co. Cavan priest who has not prevented parishioners from attending Mass in the church […]
NPHET’s Advised Against Border Quarantines at the Start of The Outbreak – Part 1 On the 25th of February 2021, the Dáil voted to require all travellers coming to the country from high-risk regions to complete a mandatory 14 days of quarantine. A border quarantine is a standard public health policy in a period of […]
Our economy is crippled, and we’re facing into an expected surge of non-Covid deaths – everything from cancer to heart disease – because of the restrictions placed on our heath service for the past year. But is this never-ending lockdown actually following the science? A growing number of leading experts don’t seem to think so, […]
Three professors of medicine have released an infographic summarising the six Covid-19 treatments they say have been shown to help patients survive the disease. Profs William Bain, Georgios Kitsios and Tomeka Suber of the University of Pittsburgh said that while the best tool was prevention, their study of the “drug trials and success stories” involving Covid-19 […]
Two weeks ago, the state of Texas lifted its mandate for the public to wear facemasks. At the time, President Biden said it was a grossly irresponsible move and “neandarthal thinking“. Obviously, the numbers in Texas are worth watching in the weeks and months to come, and we will do that, here at Gript, in […]
Hairdressers will be closed until May, the Taoiseach said yesterday, meaning that those of us who survive lockdown will emerge, eventually, into the sunshine, with hair and beards flowing like the cavemen of yore. But that’s only if we survive what NPHET says is the latest “dangerous moment” of the never-ending pandemic: Ireland could be […]
There’s been a lot of attention given, in the lockdown-sceptical parts of the Irish internet, in recent days, to the results of a freedom of information request made by a website called freepress.ie. Here’s what they say: Freepress.ie can exclusively reveal that Irish hospitals were never under strain throughout 2020, based on newly released official […]
The preliminary agenda for the annual conference of the Teachers Union of Ireland has been released, and with it, a list of motions that the Union is set to debate when it gathers for that conference later this spring. Top of the agenda is motion 177, introduced by the Dublin branch of the TUI, which […]
‘Facts tell, stories sell,’ according to the advertising maxim. Leaving the question of whether an advertising maxim should have anything to do with news or journalism, clearly in contemporary times, it does. In recent Irish history, for example, we can trace the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the long-running campaign by activists to tell […]
The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has just released its statistics on the number of work permits issued to Irish companies for February 2021. Despite the Covid crisis, there has been little change in the numbers of people arriving in Ireland to take up jobs when huge numbers of people already here are dependent […]