Observations. Satire. Politics. Interviews.
Today (April 14th 2020), the Department of Social Welfare have announced an additional 26,000 people successfully applied for the emergency COVID-19 pandemic unemployment payment by the end of last week. This brings the overall total in the state to 533,000. The number is lower than many would have expected and perhaps indicates that the massive…
I think if the world was in fact ending, nobody would actually say the ‘End is nigh’, I think there’d be better things to do. But ah…this song is about the people you might want around….and being from Dublin city there’s a lot of you here tonight…and..I know a lot of people are here….with those…
I was watching the Queen’s speech to her royal and loyal subjects the other night. I couldn’t help but marvel at all of the things that she has lived through, stretching back to World War Two. While Boris Johnson was getting carted off to St Thomas’s hospital in London, stricken down by the dastardly coronavirus,…
As we know, the Covid-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment is an emergency payment for employees and the self-employed who have lost their income and are fully unemployed due to the pandemic. To date 507,000 payments have been processed. Here we breakdown the payments on a county by county basis. ” Taking account of the claims that…
Reporting and processing is a problem in Ireland and across Europe. Our latest casualty numbers are moving from horrible to horrific. And I will certainly get to that later in the piece. But first I want to start with Belgium and France to make sure we in Ireland are indeed recording everything properly here. In…
Interview 4 in my Ordinary people…..Extraordinary lives… series. I would imagine that sports people are finding the embargo on freedom of movement difficult at the moment. People that are used to the routine of regular group training and then weekend performance. Sports is an amateur pursuit for all but the lucky few and last week…
France added 23,000 new cases yesterday (April 03 2020) to it’s official COVID-19 statistics. It points to the value of journalists, opposition and ordinary people consistently asking questions. France’s first cases started to appear on or around February 15th 2020. For close to 7 weeks they were only reporting coronavirus patients that were going through…
I shouldn’t have opened my mouth really. No sooner had I completed my last post than Leo Varadkar decided to up the social distancing ante. Alas, night time strolls require GPS like accuracy this week. 2 kilometres is the new 2 metres. Stray further at your peril! It seems the country was getting cute and…
The number of coronavirus deaths suddenly jumped by 10 people yesterday bringing Ireland’s overall total to 19. May they all rest in peace. If yesterday marks anything, it marks the end of the beginning. For people out there growing increasingly anxious, I would point out that it is a trend consistent with other countries and…
“Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go.”― Lana Del Rey I won’t lie – I think I might be an All-Ireland champion at this whole social distancing craic. A natural. I’ve taken to going for long walks at around midnight just to absorb the quiet. Stillness has a…
I have started a new habit. Once a day Dr. Tony Holohan somberly reveals the daily Irish coronavirus statistics and unless your living on Mars you know today (Mar 20th) brought 126 new cases. Then I wait for an hour to see how the 4 main news sources in the country headline the news. The…
COVID-19 cases properly broke onto the shores of the United States on March 18th. Testing is starting to ramp up and what testing is revealing is that the coronavirus is already rampant in the United States. It is quite unbelievable that capability to test and process quickly, in the thousands per day, is only really…
On the 23rd of February 2020 the WHO recorded the first 2 deaths from coronavirus in Northern Italy. Ireland current has two coronavirus deaths. We track the track the day to day Italian statistics below. It paints a very stark picture. As we will see it was very quickly out of control. We use World…
In essence we are at war in Ireland now. We will all need to start thinking in that mind-frame. No doubt, it is an unusual war and against an invisible enemy. To fight this war we must ask ourselves – What it is our enemy wants. What are our enemy’s goals. At this stage of…
“It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” – Winston Churchill I suppose the key to any musing about Boris Johnson is: How much do you buy into the caricature? If you’re already – all in – on this idea of him as…