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![]() Fintan O&x27TooleThe Irish Times |
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘Antarctic Thaw Poses World Threat’. Variants on that headline appeared everywhere last week as we learned that the Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk...
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...
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...
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...
Sinéad O’Connor lived in different places, but her second home was St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. Her remarkable memoir...
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...
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...
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...
Instead of hiring very expensive crisis managers well known people caught up in scandals might take some tips from an admittedly unlikely source: the...
Irish people naturally think everything that happens in Croke Park has global importance. But one thing that happened there really is of worldwide...
The crackle of static emanating from our TV speakers while we were watching Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly answer questions before the...
There has been much talk of RTÉ's management culture. But what of actual culture – the national broadcaster’s relationship to the nation’s...
When the scandal over its hidden payments first broke, Minister for Media Catherine Martin said that RTÉ is in “nearly an existential crisis”....
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...
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...
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...
Language sometimes gets in the way of thought. This is probably the case when “neutrality”, “tradition” and “Irish” appear in close...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The State is a half-arsed alchemist. It has somehow cracked the secret formula for transmuting the base metal of an underdeveloped society into...
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...
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,...
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...
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,...