AT THE OUTSET of any new year, many of us hope for a clean slate of some kind. A sense that whatever was unstable about the year gone by can be made stable, that an equilibrium can be found. 

Good luck with that. 

You know that phenomenon that happens with journalists and columnists sometimes, where you start to get the sense that an over-exposure to the news has sent them around the twist? And now you’re sort of just watching their steady descent into madness until they end up roaming the streets with their phones out, live-streaming themselves having allergic reactions to 5G masts? Well, if that ever happens to me, just know that this was the week when I really started losing it. 

Within the first week of 2026, the United States had kidnapped a world leader from his home and nakedly stated its intention to requisition that country’s oil. So Iraq, but without the foreplay. Nicolas Maduro is now being held in a New York prison while the US liberates its oil supply, leaving international law lying in a coffin that, by this point, is already 99% nail.

Days later, an agent of ICE, a 20,000-strong modern Gestapo force empowered to brutalise whomever they see fit across the United States, shot dead a woman named Renee Good for no discernible reason other than she was filming their activities on the streets of Minneapolis. In the aftermath, both Donald Trump and JD Vance have peddled debunked narratives that there was just cause for the shooting. US border patrol agents shot and injured a further two people in Portland in the days that followed.

Hunger strikers are dying in British prisons because they are being held as terrorists owing to their involvement with Palestine Action, at a time when Palestinians are still being killed by Israeli airstrikes under the pretence of a ceasefire.

In short, it is very hard to embody any kind of ‘new year, new me’ vibe when the world remains so unchangingly bleak. 

It is impossible to sort this nightmarish deluge of atrocities into a hierarchy, but one of the most concerning stories from the last week is one that the Irish government has sought to run away from rather than tackle with any sort of........

© TheJournal