Logo

I see. This poor broken Republic clearly still has some way to sink. Pitting Gay Mitchell and Michael Higgins against the Sinn Fein electoral machine in the battle for the Park is rather like deploying the Kirov girls’ ballet school to protect the Winter Palace from the Bolsheviks’ Third Shock Army. The last I heard, the IRA army council had not been disbanded. The last I heard, Martin McGuinness was still on it. Ergo, are we close to putting an […]

Look; I’ve been living in Ireland longer than most Irish people have been alive, but sometimes — no, often — I think I understand the country no more than I did the day I arrived at Mrs Higgins’s boarding house at the back of the Stella Cinema, Rathmines. How is it possible that we are importing doctors from all over the world, even though we have given free college education to all medical students for the past 16 years? Irish […]

LET me acknowledge a personal interest at the outset here: I wrote the foreword to the catalogue for the latest exhibition of paintings by the artist Anthony Murphy at the Ib Jorgensen gallery in Dublin. I would like to say that Ib paid me €10,000 for my contribution, in fact I would love to say it, but it wouldn’t be true. I wrote the foreword because Anthony is a quite wonderful artist, of a kind that is regrettably becoming rarer […]

When Ryan Tubridy, in the company of four Irish-American heroes from 9/11, last weekend spoke about “an ommahj”, did they have the least idea that he meant actually “homage”? That’s the word they would have used, and it’s the word Shakespeare would have used, and just about everybody has used since the Norman-French were kicking the tripe out of the poor old Anglo-Saxons, and making them pay homage to the invader. In a way, that’s where the damage was done: […]

A national narrative is not just about the past. It also enables the present, for it contains a covert and coded morality. This is why I go on and on, endlessly, about the 1916 Rising. It was at its core an evil event, wholly unjustified by the circumstances that existed in Ireland, with many deplorable outcomes. If you make that affair the “start” of authentic independent Irishness, then you cannot be surprised that the resultant political ethos is as lacking […]

So much has been said about 9/11 that there’s no point in my adding anything about related events in the US or in the Muslim world. But in its own way, as interesting was the impact of 9/11 on Ireland and Europe generally. Putting aside the shock and disgust felt by all, left and right, pro- and anti-American, at the appalling loss of innocent life in this perfectly evil atrocity, there was a very clear division in the subsequent response. […]

I’m happy to say that my Hunky Dory calendar arrived safely yesterday. It consists of a series of exceedingly tasteful photographs of young women, clad in what might be some splendidly minimalist GAA outfits, or since a couple are holding an oval ball, possibly Australian Rules. The less the merrier, I always say in matters of girls’ togs. It is almost a universal rule in life that both men and women like looking at pictures of naked or near-naked women, […]

It is not within the powers of mere mortal journalists to comment on, never mind invent, the following story: Tony Blair, garbed in white and on the banks of the River Jordan, last year became godfather to the twin children of 80-year old Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng Murdoch, who is not 80. Moreover, Wendi Murdoch and Queen Rania of Jordan, who hosted the event, were on a judging panel for a film prize organised by the Tony Blair Faith […]