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If you want a sense of how utterly unrelated to reality our modern political class remains, it was in the recent declaration by the “Minister for Primary Care” (oh please) Roisin Shortall that the government would introduce “free” GP treatment for all by 2015 and universal health insurance in 2016. The following year, no doubt, the government will eliminate our dependency on oxygen, following the Equality Tribunal’s finding that it is discriminatory. The year after that, all children will be […]

The Filmbase arts centre in Dublin is set today to be the scene of the latest in the latest of the irrational and phobic demonstrations against Israel, led by Raymond Deane, who rejoices in the most Orwellian of titles, “Cultural Boycott Officer” for the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Whatever you call this, it is freedom of neither speech nor of movement if anti-Israeli opinions are backed with coercion and pickets. But it is all like some grotesque screenplay that Monty […]

BASIL D’Oliveira had a perfect sense of timing: as a batsman, his late cuts and his drives to cover were the sweetest essays in synchrony. His was a royally serene presence on the cricket pitch, almost like Henry V amongst his troops the night before Agincourt. That there could have ever been an international row about his “race” shows what dark and incomprehensible times we’ve left behind (notwithstanding matters in Naas, which I might come to later this week). And […]

FIRST things first: 40 years ago, the Parachute Regiment had become state-authorised killers in Northern Ireland. According to David McKittrick’s indispensable volume ‘Lost Lives’, the Paras killed 39 people between 1971 and 1976. Only seven of these were paramilitaries: but one of those, Joe McCann, the Official IRA leader, was gunned down, unarmed, on a May Saturday afternoon. The death toll of 33 unarmed victims killed by the three battalions of the Parachute Regiment is more than that for hundreds […]

RASPBERRIES are growing in my garden, rich as grapes in Bordeaux. The first game-bags of the shooting season probably contain as many humming birds as pheasant. This time last year, a new Ice Age had arrived. November 2011, and the swallows are assembling off the Wexford coast, wondering if they might be allowed back for the winter. Who would be a weather forecaster in Ireland? No one thanks you for getting it right – no one even remembers – but […]

We heard a straightforward untruth yesterday with the declaration that numbers are falling in the public service. They are not. The falsehood is based on the numbers of full-time employees, down to around 300,000. But if you allow for job-sharing, in fact there are 404,200 employees in the public sector, an actual increase of 3,100 from a year ago. Moreover, average hourly pay in the public sector is €28.90. In the private sector it is €19.33. Has this government tried […]

All ideologies are wrong, including the one that says all ideologies are wrong. But generally speaking, the free market is the best way of getting the best out of society. Now that appears to be an insane declaration, at a time when the most visible markets in the world, the stock exchanges, are about as rational as a women’s gym changing-room containing a mouse with a camera. However, this is not a dogma, merely a rule of thumb. Other rules […]

This is the address I made on Remembrance Sunday at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin November 13, 2011 I begin today by honouring our new President, the commander in chiefof our Defence Forces. Mr President sir, that is surely an honour you will hold closeto your heart – and in this place especially. For fifty one years ago this week the Niemba Ambush of our soldiers in the Congo took place. And it was at the remembrance Sunday servicehere two days […]

A day like today comes but once a century: 11/11/11. Add in the moment that the guns ceased firing, and it becomes: 11/11/11/11. What a strange verticality, a picket-fence through which to view history. Of course, like most historical events, the 1918 Armistice was not really how the popular imagination has painted it, for it certainly did not bring a universal peace. Instead of the Ottoman Empire being treated with wise civility, it was brutally and ruinously dismembered. Civil war […]

I had been watching ‘Downton Abbey’ these recent weeks in the fond and fervent hope that the great Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918 would wipe out the entire household. And then, to my disbelieving horror, I discovered that last Sunday’s programme was not the last. Far from the flu making short work of the entire cast, it had done for just one of their number: a seldom-seen waif. Let me be frank. I have followed ‘Downton Abbey’ with the sick, […]