RTE is promoting the snappily titled “Fair City Civil Action Special” on its website. Always slow to jump on the bandwagon, our indigenous soap opera has finally decided to exploit the issue of child abuse undertaken by Catholic priests. No doubt there will be the usual fig leaf of public service education when a concerned […]

Travelling into work the other day, during a break in “Morning Ireland”, I heard a sequence of clips of famous Americans giving famous quotes. There was Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you”, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, and Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” […]

Today’s New York Times reports that New York neighbourhoods in the Bronx, Yonkers, and Queens that have traditionally been home to Irish immigrants are seeing both naturalised citizens and illegals who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s returning to Ireland in unprecedented numbers. Such is the scale of the exodus that, according […]

One of the (few?) advantages of maintaining a blog is that it prevents you from indulging in that most futile of bourgeois literary exercises: writing letters to the editor. Two pieces in this weekend’s papers got my letter-writing dander up.The first was by Mark Lawson, in the Guardian. His op-ed columns are often rather lazy, […]

My post-colonial hackles are bristling again. This time the offender is the toxic AA Gill. In yesterday’s Sunday Times he reviewed some new gardening show co-hosted by Diarmuid Gavin:Diarmuid is the bad boy of gardening, a bit of a little rude rebel, a red-hot poker among the lilies. Gavin defends his wicked rep with a […]

It seems concerns about “moral values” are even seeping into “old Europe.” A report that appeared in Le Monde a few days ago detailed a bit of moral outrage over the resting place of Victor Noir in the graveyard of P�re-Lachaise in Paris. Noir was a journalist who was fatally wounded on 10 January 1870 […]

The concession speech by John Kerry and the victory address by President Bush brought home what was lost to America, and indeed the rest of the globe, yesterday. I’m biased (who isn’t), but I thought that Senator Kerry was eloquent in defeat and showed an emotional core that many accused him of lacking. (But I […]

In the wake of Bush’s gobsmacking victory, the insight de jour is that voters (or rather slightly more than 50% of them) ignored the quagmire in Iraq, the unsustainable economic situation, and the general incompetence of the administration, preferring to focus on the issue of the candidates’ “morality” and “character”–secular euphemisms for being religious. Yet […]

The brouhaha over the failure of designate Commission president Jos� Manuel Barroso to form an administration because of objections of MEPs to the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione as European Commissioner for justice and home affairs appears to confirm three trends:1. The growing culture gap between Europe and the US. Buttiglione’s position was considered untenable because […]

It’s been a while since my last post–small matters such as the birth of my son and being the best man at a friend’s wedding have distracted me from the urgent task of broadcasting my views across the blogosphere. On Tuesday, while my wife was focusing on her breathing and trying to survive her contractions, […]