“Remember the “living with polio” campaign?” said Irish journalist Philip O’Connor the other day. Nope, me neither.
You know that scene in the first Jurassic Park movie, where Jeff Goldblum’s character says “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should”? That’s a great summation of where Irish politicians are at; just throwing policy after policy at the wall to see […]
Politicians and Governments have had it in for cash for quite a while, for a whole range of reasons, but one above all others: It is, by and large, untraceable. This makes it perfect if you want to hide your wealth from the Government, or engage in crime, or avoid taxes like VAT, or do […]
“THIS IS NOT A FREE COUNTRY”: Ann McElhinney, a native Donegal conservative filmmaker who lives in the US, explains why she wouldn’t return to Ireland.
“If we don’t do it now…when will we ever do it?”
There was a time when humanity’s heroes were almost invariably the champions of freedom. In politics, philosophy, story-telling, and beyond, our idols were those who fought the good fight so that people could live free and in peace. It was viscerally understood, by all of us, that freedom was a good thing and that no […]
A district court in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik has ruled in seven separate cases last week that forcing people to stay in hotel quarantine is illegal. According to a statement on the government website, the court ruled that forcing passengers coming from other countries to stay in quarantine hotels “lacks legal basis.” The government […]
I do not own a conventional smart phone. Instead, I intentionally use a style of flip phone whose rugged case and physical numeric keypad buttons won’t be injured by a drop of three or four feet to a concrete surface. It can receive some texts on its small screen, and I can even send texts […]
The EU blinked. There’s no point in attempting to put a gloss on it. You know the kind of thing: “This is not a time for triumphalism…” On the contrary, yes, it is. Europe should celebrate the Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Boris Johnson because it is a vindication of what democracy is about, and […]
Religious freedom and political freedom are woven from the same cloth. Reflecting on Irelands experience under the cosh of the Covid-19 pandemic there are very real reasons for concern. The scientific evidence justifying authoritarian edicts restricting freedom of movement and of religious practise– enforced by an unsettling show of armed force–have not been properly set […]
In her 2007 autobiography, Infidel: My Life, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells an interesting story about her experience when arriving to Holland at age 20 as a refugee from Somalia. The story is a poignant yet simple one. Ayaan was amazed by two features of daily life in Holland which are, to you and me, things […]
My parting of the ways with the left, or rather the Marxist-oriented left, was a complex one. It took place during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states, although for a time I deluded myself that something better might emerge, or even that it might be preferable if the regimes survived. […]