The controversial speech made by Germany’s ambassador to Ireland, Christian Pauls, demonstrates that you don’t have to be a diplomat to head an embassy. Offering a bleak overview of his host country, Herr Pauls apparently told his audience –a group of 80 German industrialists gathered at Clontarf Castle–that Ireland was a “coarse” place where the […]

The above image, which displays a mesmerizing swathe of esoteric technology, comes from a New York Times article that explains how IBM researcher Stuart P. Parkin is using nanomaterials in an attempt to create vastly improved electronic storage technologies and “to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of […]

Taking an opsimathic interest in the history of my hometown, I’ve been contentedly engaged by Maurice Craig’s landmark publication, Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City. Craig’s aphoristic style (“[In] Dublin luxuries have always tended to come before necessities.”) and interest in the wider intellectual milieu combine to produce a book that transcends the category […]

Watching General David Petraeus’s attempt to sell President Bush’s surge strategy to U.S. senators, I’ve been distracted by the matrix of ribbons and badges adorning the general’s chest, the profusion of which would not embarrass the late Leonid Brezhnev. Some of this luxuriant military “flair” is glossed here.

Snapshot of what’s concerning readers of the online Daily Telegraph as of lunchtime, Friday September 7:(The thought struck me today whether the obsessive focus by the media on this individual tragedy isn’t some weird displacement activity, distracting our attention from the hundreds of lives lost weekly in the Iraq hellmouth.)

A wise man, who has risen above the distractions of mere commonplace things, will eventually discover that much can be achieved by apparently doing sweet FA.

Now that every news mag in the U.S. wishes it were more like The Economist (see the “Reagan’s Tears” cover for an example of Time‘s new Econo-like look), the New York Observer features a timely debunking of the British mag’s occasionally colourless/pompous prose style: “The Economist is less provocative than it is aggressively boring: “The […]

The news that Dublin’s central library will move from the rather grim precincts of the Ilac Centre to the grandiose, albeit down-at-heel, Ambassador cinema building seems like evidence of one of Dublin Corporation’s less calamitous planning meetings. The relocation will not come cheap: “The city council will become sub-tenants paying €1.2m annually in rent and […]

Irish Independent, March 26, 2007 Taoiseach Bertie Ahern promised an extra €300m a minute to voters as he took pre-election auction politics to a new level. In the course of his 23-minute address to the Fianna Fail ard fheis, he promised €6.9bn in tax cuts, pensions and public service spending. Irish Times, September 5, 2007 […]

I missed the debut of RTE’s “gritty” new drama about life on the fringes of the Celtic Tiger, Prosperity. However, RTE has obligingly not only made it possible to watch the first episode on the web, but allowed aspiring writers to download the series scripts for perusal.Here’s page 1 of “stacey’s story,” copied and pasted […]