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Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O&x27Toole

The Irish Times

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By playing the part of a predator, Russell Brand convinced us he couldn’t be one

Last July, on his YouTube and Rumble shows Stay Free, Russell Brand interviewed the far-right governor of Florida Ron DeSantis. It is a crossover...

18.09.2023 40

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Varadkar could yet leave a mark of decency and justice. Here’s how

Ignore the political kites that always darken the sky at this time of the year. Don’t get distracted by all the leaks, spins, special pleading and...

12.09.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The West must help Ukraine to define victory differently

I don’t know the Russian for Make Love Not War. But something tells me I won’t have to learn it anytime soon. I can’t find a single Russia...

05.09.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Sinn Féin has come a hell of a long way. But it had a hell of a long way to go

Let’s consider what might at first seem an odd question: what should the current Government do to prepare for the probability that Sinn Féin might...

02.09.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The only difference between a good migrant and a bad one is time

Last week, I went again to a place that was in my eyeline for most of the first 20 years of my life, the Jewish cemetery on Aughavannagh Road in...

29.08.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ should have seen a crisis coming for decades

So often in Ireland, things come to a head and then just slip away again. So it was in the late 1960s when it seemed that fundamental choices would...

22.08.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Five things that the HSE is getting wrong

We have a native variant on the light bulb joke: how many simultaneous crises does an organisation have to create before it needs to be changed? If...

20.08.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Five things that the HSE is getting wrong

We have a native variant on the light bulb joke: how many simultaneous crises does an organisation have to create before it needs to be changed? If...

20.08.2023 4

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The only thing Tubridy seemed truly sorry for was himself

For Ryan Tubridy, sorry was not the hardest word. He used expressions of regret for his part in the RTÉ debacle fluently enough. It was just the...

19.08.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: All my life there have been climate warnings. We’re ingenious at ignoring them

‘Antarctic Thaw Poses World Threat’. Variants on that headline appeared everywhere last week as we learned that the Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk...

15.08.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Ireland has stark physical deficits, from housing to public transport to medical centres to basics such as sewage and water

I am fortunate to be able to live much of the time in the beautiful village of Ballyvaughan in north Clare. It’s a gorgeous place, surrounded by the...

12.08.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Farmers encouraged to believe action to control climate chaos is a plot against them

The front page of the current edition of the Irish Farmers Journal is dominated by a picture of a disconsolate-looking father and son, Francis and...

08.08.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Ireland can be proud of itself only if it can confront its shameful deeds

In February 1926, on the fourth night of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, which is set a decade earlier during the 1916 Rising, stink...

05.08.2023 9

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Sinéad O’Connor’s openness was a curse for her but a blessing for us

Sinéad O’Connor lived in different places, but her second home was St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. Her remarkable memoir...

01.08.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Our habit of jetting off to sun holidays won’t end well. Just ask Icarus

Like Icarus we keep flying towards the sun – and it didn’t end too well for him either. This week temperatures in Rhodes and Athens rose again to...

29.07.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: A tiny area of Dublin is Ireland’s most segregated district

Every time an especially nasty crime of violence is committed in Dublin’s north inner city against someone who does not live there, the area briefly...

25.07.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Why is the State investing billions in projects that depend on goodwill of property owners?

We have our own Irish version of the permissive society. It’s not about sex – it’s about land. On the last Sunday of this month, perhaps 25,000...

22.07.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: How to survive a scandal and get everyone to forgive you

Instead of hiring very expensive crisis managers well known people caught up in scandals might take some tips from an admittedly unlikely source: the...

18.07.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Ireland is uncomfortable with any criticism of US actions, even when they are wrong

Irish people naturally think everything that happens in Croke Park has global importance. But one thing that happened there really is of worldwide...

15.07.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: In the end, Ryan Tubridy resorted to the Father Ted defence

The crackle of static emanating from our TV speakers while we were watching Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly answer questions before the...

12.07.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ bureaucrats fantasised they could turn themselves into Broadway impresarios

There has been much talk of RTÉ's management culture. But what of actual culture – the national broadcaster’s relationship to the nation’s...

11.07.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ must change or die

­When the scandal over its hidden payments first broke, Minister for Media Catherine Martin said that RTÉ is in “nearly an existential crisis”....

08.07.2023 7

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Noel Kelly is not Ryan Tubridy’s Father Confessor. He’s his attack dog

In 1981, Seamus Heaney wrote to his American agent, Selma Warner, about the fees she was demanding for readings by him on US campuses. He was angry...

04.07.2023 60

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ abandoned the public interest during Covid and capitulated to Tubridy’s tone-deaf demands

Let’s go back for a moment to late 2021 and early 2022. That’s when Ryan Tubridy’s agent, Noel Kelly, was pressing RTÉ's director general, Dee...

01.07.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Ryan Tubridy chose silence instead of speaking out. An extended silence should follow

Last month, when Ryan Tubridy was about to present his last Late Late Show, the RTÉ website ran a tribute: “what you get from Ryan Tubridy is his...

27.06.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Irish neutrality: A tiny Riverdance of angels dancing on the head of a Fáinne pin

Language sometimes gets in the way of thought. This is probably the case when “neutrality”, “tradition” and “Irish” appear in close...

24.06.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Murky links between your iPhone, our tax take and companies drilling in Carlow

Everything is connected. The genius of globalised capitalism is to make us forget this. Here are two facts, linked in ways that illuminate Ireland’s...

20.06.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The demise of the Kinahans will usher in another equally vile crew

A quick Google search this week threw up 5,390 recent news stories about the fall of the Kinahan crime gang – even though everyone knows that the...

17.06.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The ominous difference between Johnson and Trump

It couldn’t happen to a nicer couple. But the simultaneous disasters that befell Boris Johnson and Donald Trump last Friday deserve, at best, two...

13.06.2023 40

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: All records of all church-run institutions should be nationalised now

Tom Wall’s early life reads like something from a novel by Charles Dickens. Until it starts to read like something from a novel by Stephen King....

10.06.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Can Sinn Féin bring the political system back into line with Irish society?

To understand the strangeness of current Irish politics, you have to start by recognising that it is a system held up by three pillars. And each of...

06.06.2023 6

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The far right gives power to the most obnoxious little gits

It is always said that it was Winston Churchill’s rasping upper-class tones that rallied the British people in their darkest hour after the...

03.06.2023 50

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: What if Sinn Féin makes Northern Ireland viable?

Forty years ago last weekend, Gerry Adams, who was then about to become president of Sinn Féin, explicitly endorsed the IRA’s tactic of shooting...

30.05.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: If we follow the money, the destination is a United Ireland

So, is it the economy stupid? Or is it stupid to think that people’s sense of their collective identity is primarily shaped by economics? These...

16.05.2023 8

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s giant open-air experiment on property has failed

Why does the European country with the worst housing crisis have one of the lowest levels of investment in housing? That’s the very basic question...

09.05.2023 30

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: The more hollow the crown, the more splendidly the jewels encrusting it must shine

The less substance there is to any political institution, the more it must play up its own mystique. The coronation of King Charles III is £100...

05.05.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is the mistress of the ‘come hither’ look

The State is a half-arsed alchemist. It has somehow cracked the secret formula for transmuting the base metal of an underdeveloped society into...

25.04.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Time to cancel talk of Irish coffin ships

When he addressed the Oireachtas last week, Joe Biden evoked the journey into exile of his forebears: “Yesterday, I returned to Co Louth, where I...

18.04.2023 30

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Trump reality TV show is still much bigger box office than Biden’s sentimental journey

Every visit to Ireland by a US president is also a visit to America. It is intended to beam messages back to the homeland. In Joe Biden’s case,...

15.04.2023 7

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Biden has more in common with Ireland’s past than present

He really should be called President Joe Finnegan, and if you listen to him or read his books, you sense that he wishes he was. Biden is not an Irish...

11.04.2023 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Trump is revelling in this mad episode which trivialises the serious state of US democracy

In the grand tradition of finding the Irish angle on everything, I offer you Stormy Daniels’s horse. I don’t know its name, but I do know that,...

31.03.2023 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

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