Emmanuel Todd’s After the Empire, which was a bestseller in France, is a somewhat worrying tract. Not that its message that the United States faces an inevitable decline, dragged down by economic profligacy and imperial overstretch, is particularly new or shocking. No, what is disturbing about this book is less its chronicling of American dysfunction […]

The new issue of ThreeMonkeysOnline is available just a click away. Plenty of substantial pieces, including interviews with Jim Crace, author of titles such as Quarantine, Being Dead and Six; Asne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul and A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal; and Andrew Loog Oldham, the music svengali who […]

Well, after I put the boot into Enda Kenny on Friday, the guy goes and proves himself to be a regular hero, pulling a woman from a minibus just before the vehicle rolled down an embankment. And he declines to make a big deal about it. See here for the story.

I hope to add a lenghthyish post later on this week–I’ve just finished Emmanuel Todd’s After the Empire, which I found interesting and infuriating in equal measure. I’ll explain why in due course–let’s say Thursday?But I’m currently writing up a few reviews for the main site, which should also appear this week.

I suppose that the Northern Bank robbery and the subsequent investigation into money laundering has become such a major crisis for Sinn F�in for three reasons. First, and probably least important, was the sheer size of the haul. That was guaranteed to generate headlines. Second, now that the armed struggle is over/suspended, the traditional rationale […]

Headline from the RTE website:Bono included on Nobel Prize list?

I’ve been meaning to post this for a number of days but the humdrum business of looking for a new job occasionally gets in the way of the far more important task of blogging.A friend of mine, Joe Skelly, a reservist, is currently stationed in the Civil-Military Operations Center, Baquba, Iraq. As anybody who has […]

More depressing news from the sometimes shameless realm of Irish public life: RTE has just reported that “The Standards in Public Office Commission has decided not to investigate the awarding of contracts by Minister Martin Cullen to PR consultant Monica Leech.”I wonder just how ethically dubious a Minister’s actions have to be for this toothless […]

Friday’s Irish Times’s article on Irish bloggers (which inexplicably failed to namecheck yours truly) took the community to task for focusing on international matters–frequently US foreign policy–at the expense of native issues. (See Gavin’s Blog for extensive extracts from the piece).I sometimes do feel a tad guilty for failing to address the burning issues at […]

From Friday’s Breaking News section of Ireland.com16:26 Plans to shoot Lassie in Ireland announced