Observations. Satire. Politics. Interviews.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Our collective reality has changed. Most of the ordinary people of Ireland seem to be ahead of the politicians and the HSE leadership on this point – to name but two slow moving elites. I know that there are still a few pockets of resistance to this idea out there. I am not here to…
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have released their latest figures for the coronavirus and the European countries affected. France, Germany and Spain are beginning to see big rises in the numbers of people being infected. These three countries are roughly where Italy was 5 or 6 days ago. The numbers in the…
The Department of Education issued 3 circulars on March 9th (yesterday) to the different education bodies in the country, including higher education authorities, Training boards and to Secondary & Primary schools.A copy of each circular is at the bottom of this article. Each one states the following to each of it’s addressees: “The Minister for…
Historic – day by day – look at the daily coronavirus reporting since the beginning of the outbreak. Reporting started on December 31st 2019. All statistics are referenced from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Statistics are accurate as per 09:00 GMT on March 09th 2020. UK and Irish Statistics are followed by…
My recent Coronavirus interviewing and the fever sweeping the country for the past week got me to thinking about my own brush with mortality over five years ago. In fact, it was a fever that was the first symptom. Ireland is not a country that is a natural habitat for ticks and yet somehow in…
Official HSE statistics place the population of ethnic Chinese in Ireland at somewhere in the region of 60,000 people. Many of these come to Ireland first as young scholars on a variety of different student visa programs. Today, I interviewed Changying , a woman who came to Ireland in 2002 on one of those very…
One of the talking points in Ireland since the first cases of coronavirus have hit our shores surrounds information. Specifically, how much information authorities should reveal to the general public. On the one hand our public servants and officials do not want to create widespread panic and on the other Irish people wanted to know…