Nobody told Micheál Martin that Katherine Zappone was to get the big job in New York until it arrived at Cabinet, in the form of a behind the scenes agreement amongst Fine Gael Ministers, and the hapless Taoiseach was bounced into going along with it. In the immediate aftermath, he had the look of a […]
Perhaps An Taoiseach Micheál Martin now understands what Groucho Marx meant when he said that he would not want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. I am thinking here in the context of a dinner reportedly hosted by for former Minister, now newly appointed Special Envoy for […]
You cannot blame those in Fianna Fáil – led by serial rebel Marc MacSharry – who have, at the twenty-ninth hour, decided that the time has come for a change in leadership. There is nothing else, after all, left to try. The party’s performance in the Dublin Bay South bye-election was so abysmal, so humiliating, […]
Shots fired.
As we all know, the impact of Covid-19 on the delivery of health services in the State has been catastrophic. We also know that waiting lists across nearly all medical specialties have increased significantly and that it will be years before we can finally determine the real magnitude of the crisis that has been […]
Leo Varadkar said Fine Gael is the party to “unify our island”.
The Irish media is presently gorging itself on the revelation that for a number of years, at least four Irish political parties (and probably more) asked volunteers to pose as fake polling companies in order to go door to door and conduct market research. First, we learned that Sinn Fein did it. And then, because […]
Student volunteers promised €50 each, but never paid.
One of the rather more desperate attempts by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to recoup lost ground to Sinn Féin has been to focus on the latter party’s apparent track record in voting against proposals to build housing developments. Sinn Féin has indeed pursued inconsistent policies, as we shall see, but the political reality is […]
The claim that all improvements in living conditions are illusionary distractions was pioneered first by Lenin in What is to be Done? and updated as part of new left ideology in the 1960s by Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Marxism. It still forms the basis of current identity politics in which the traditional working […]
It feels like a very long time ago now, but it is worth remembering, and reminding ourselves, that the original point of lockdowns was to reduce social contacts between people, and limit opportunities for Coronavirus to spread amongst the population. The success of lockdowns was supposed to be measured in scientific terms – the flatness […]
As bad as the new Red C/Sunday Business Post opinion poll is for Fianna Fáil the headline figures are not actually that obviously terrible. 14% nationally is still the stuff of nightmares for the party that has dominated Irish politics since the 1930’s, but it actually represents a slight increase on the previous version of […]