Observations. Satire. Politics. Interviews.
I guess the best place to start this story is in February 1994 when I made the executive decision to quit University College Galway and take a mooch out into the world. At some point I will meander into David McWilliams latest, excellent podcast episode, on the evils of conventional thinking in the midst of…
” When will the lesson be learned? When will the lesson be learned? How many more dictators must be wooed, appeased – good God, given immense privileges – before we learn? You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth ” – Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill – The Darkest Hour…
I spent last night reading the minutes of the National Public Health Emergency Team’s meetings, published to date, on the GOV.IE website. There is a certain morbid fascination in reading documents from late January and early February knowing how it all kinda ends – but legalistic language can wear you down – even with subject-matter…
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm The Irish lockdown is scheduled to end in just over…
On Friday (April 26), at a conservative guess-timate, at least 20,000 media commentators and journalists spent the day engaging in a bit of fun, faux outrage. A patronising 10,000 tweets here or an ego inflating meme retweeted 50,000 times there. One might be forgiven for thinking it was in fact a slow corona-news day. I…
It’s at times like this evening I wonder if there actually is a loose arrangement between the media and the people running the Irish coronavirus response. In the first instance I couldn’t believe I was hearing the key piece of data the chief medical officer revealed at today’s press briefing. I actually watched it back…
When the death, despair and devastation of this period of human history is finally transcribed from it’s many languages by pen to paper, one date will stand as a signalling post. Around this day historians will gather, to warm their hands and writing tools, to stoke it’s dying embers for the last burnt shards of…
Before we get to Mr. Harris and the ease and comfort with which he and the group managing coronavirus Ireland are adapting to unlimited power, we should start at the beginning. Also, from the outset, I do acknowledge that all concerned found themselves in the midst of a crisis not of this country’s making, a…
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…