The euphoria is the first thing that strikes you. “Huge numbers have been coming up to us and we’ve been trying to work out what the emotion is,” Eoin Ó Broin said in Newry on Wednesday night as he reflected on the three rallies Sinn Fein held across Ireland this week. “And the emotion […]

6 years ago

The problem with Brexit is that reality keeps on breaking through. No sooner had former Army officer and Conservative MP Bob Stewart announced that, in the fantasy combat scenario he’d dreamed up in his head, Boris Johnson was the man he’d trust to lead a platoon into battle than the reality of a conflict situation […]

7 years ago

When the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016, some wondered how Euroscepticism would cope now. For forty years, Europe had been a useful whipping boy, the entity that could be blamed for everything from banana shapes to the threat to the great British fry-up. Once the UK left and they didn’t have the […]

8 years ago

When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, my grandmother was unable to attend any of the public events due to chronic rheumatoid arthritis, but she was determined to witness his visit somehow. On the Saturday morning as the country waited for Pope John Paul II’s arrival, my mother drove my grandmother from our […]

8 years ago

Reluctantly, Paddy Cosgrave had to admit defeat in his attempt to change the world one guest speaker at a time this week, but the struggle will surely continue.   “Web Summit is a place where people should be prepared to have their opinions deeply challenged, and in turn to deeply challenge the opinions of others,” Cosgrave said […]

8 years ago

With Michel Barnier dismissing Theresa May’s Brexit customs proposals on Thursday, many people are declaring that her Chequers plan is now dead and May’s survival as prime minister is, as usual, under threat. Her Brexit secretary Dominic Raab had moved this week to reassure the people of Britain that their government is working tirelessly to […]

8 years ago

There will be some who will wonder if Eamon Dunphy has made the right decision by electing not to renew his contract with RTE. It is entirely possible that at some time in the future those who consider that Eamon Dunphy has made the wrong decision about renewing his contract with RTE will include Eamon […]

8 years ago

When the picture emerged from the G7 summit last month of world leaders standing around Donald Trump, it was generally agreed that this perfectly framed shot resembled a Renaissance painting in its study of character. But, for some us, it resembled the work of a great 20th century artist, an artist who would have embraced […]

8 years ago

As England prepare for a World Cup semi-final on Wednesday, the weekend saw the latest laments that Gareth Southgate is now the only leader the country can rely on. Southgate, it was said, was redefining what Englishness means, an urgent enough task given the havoc wreaked by English nationalism in recent times, particularly in England. […]

8 years ago

“Didn’t think we’d talk about this today, but fuck it.” It’s Wednesday afternoon and Richie Sadlier is doing an interview in support of the Yes campaign, but the conversation has gone in a different direction. He has been explaining why it’s important for him to say what he believes about the need to repeal the […]

8 years ago

For 45 minutes, Manchester City were merciless. Pep Guardiola had reverted to first principles at the Etihad, essentially selecting a team of midfielders, with Kompany and Aguero left out. In doing so, he ensured Liverpool would suffer, not through the aggression of Kompany or the goals of Aguero, but through the endless, sadistic movement of […]

8 years ago

As a people we have only recently released ourselves from obedience to the Catholic Church. For a long time, the church had the power to fill us with terror about many things.  Sometimes, it can appear that we have replace this great terror with many little terrors. Instead of condemnation from the pulpit, we have […]

8 years ago

As Britain prepares for the next stage of its Brexit negotiations, there is going to be a lot of yelling at clouds. The attacks on the Good Friday Agreement by prominent Leave figures this week represented the latest bewildering encounter between reality and the fantasy version of Brexit or, as they sometimes call it, Brexit. In […]

8 years ago

If there was theme – beyond the desire to be free – at the Irexit conference that took place in the RDS in Dublin on Saturday, it was that the mainstream media is silencing dissenting voices, with many of the voices here dissenting in the room. The conference’s keynote speaker was Nigel Farage, a man […]

8 years ago

To step into the Disclosures Tribunal at Dublin Castle is to step into a dizzying meta world. “This is me talking now,” Michael McDowell said at one point this week, as he referenced the words of Michael McDowell who was counsel for Maurice McCabe at the O’Higgins Commission which is now being explored by, among […]

8 years ago

Two men made their way out of Ballybricken Church on Tuesday afternoon as the wind blew across the hills and the storm cleared its throat. A few minutes later, a car pulled up outside the church and a TV cameraman asked if there was anything else in Ballybricken. On the face of it, there didn’t […]

8 years ago

Anyone who has suffered a bereavement knows the feelings that can accompany the anniversary of a death. No matter how much time has passed, many can dread the day as it approaches. Sometimes it can pass uneventfully, but in other cases, it brings back painful memories of those who have been lost. Often it is […]

8 years ago

A friend of Charles J Haughey’s once told me a story about the time they both gave up drink. Charlie’s friend had quit first, so Haughey’s reasoning was, “If that fucker can do it, I can do it.” So Haughey stopped and his friend noted that he stayed stopped, as he did, for a time. […]

8 years ago

On Friday, some believed that Brexit moved closer to reality, but the best it may ever achieve is a regulatory alignment with reality. The EU has agreed that enough progress has been made to move into the second phase for the Brexit negotiations, which some are warning will be even more difficult, but whatever phase […]

8 years ago

Donald Trump needs an enemy. During his presidential campaign, he was fortunate to have an opponent who he might have handpicked if he needed material. For a time after his election victory, he floundered without Hillary Clinton which is why he never went without her for too long. Even as the investigation into his links […]

8 years ago

Seinfeld put it best. When George Costanza tells Jerry that he is someone who is different to the rest, a man especially sensitive to the plight of the human race, he explains that this is because “I can sense the slightest human suffering”. Jerry, enduring some mental anguish of his own as he listens to […]

8 years ago

When Ireland began the game in Copenhagen with a brief spell of passing, it seemed as if there might be a radical departure from their standard approach to any kind of football match. Perhaps Martin O’Neill felt with the World Cup as a prize, it was time to change the approach. However, after about 90 […]

8 years ago

Ireland is a side in the image of its manager, a team which has faith in its ability to triumph in any circumstances.

8 years ago

In 1929, Marjorie Merriweather Post threw a party in her Florida home. To entertain her guests, she summoned the amalgamated three-ring power of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The show featured clowns, trapeze artists and what was confidently claimed to be the “world’s smallest mule”. When Marjorie Merriweather Post died in 1973, […]

8 years ago

What the world needs now…

8 years ago

Brexit is now entering development hell.

9 years ago

“It’s chipping away and making people go, ‘Fuck, that’s not a bad idea’.”

9 years ago

Last Saturday evening, a dog was brought into the foyer of the Abbeyfield Hotel in Ballaghaderreen. The dog ran up and down the lobby and chased a plastic bottle that the kids in the hotel threw for him to fetch. Some of the children shrieked with delight, a couple were apprehensive. But for all of […]

9 years ago

“People saw and heard things on a scale they have never seen before.”

9 years ago

‘There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear’

9 years ago

In the astonishing opening to this incredible final, Real Madrid had seemed liked a bewildered bystander. Juventus had begun with a purpose which suggested that all the lost finals and all those regrets would be forgotten. Cristiano Ronaldo was appealing to the referee for fouls, but he looked like a man who lived under a […]

9 years ago

It is hard to be cynical

9 years ago

Sport and music. When you’re young, there often is nothing else. These are the things you lose yourself in. These are your safe places. Parents dropped their kids off at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on Monday night with all the quotidian anxiety and worry that are part of letting your children go anywhere. […]

9 years ago

My father was a Kerryman and he had a theory why Kerry people were believed to be cute and wily. It began when people would start talking to someone from Kerry and incorrectly assume they were talking to an idiot. When the conversation ended, they walked away pleased with the patience and kindness they had […]

9 years ago

Having called an election as Britain prepares for the Brexit negotiations, Theresa May was outraged this week to discover that the EU might also have a view of the Brexit negotiations during the election campaign. Her speech outside Downing Street on Wednesday was the moment when May, having noted how preying on the anxieties of […]

9 years ago

On Friday, 24 hours after Peter Boylan resigned from the board of the National Maternity Hospital, it was reported that the EU was preparing to state that if Ireland unified, Northern Ireland would automatically become part of the European Union. As the former master of the Coombe, Professor Chris Fitzpatrick was resigning from the new […]

9 years ago

Don McCormack is not sure if he’ll ever hear crowds cheering for him like that again. There were 50,000 people in the Kim Il-sung stadium and they were all encouraging him or determined to be seen to encourage him. McCormack ran the Pyongyang marathon a couple of weeks ago. During a four-month trip across Asia, […]

9 years ago

Jerry Flannery, telling it like it is

9 years ago

There are those who insist that the proposed lifting of the Good Friday drinking ban will be an important step in normalising Ireland’s troubled relationship with alcohol. In the arguments about the Seanad bill tabled on Wednesday which would allow pubs to open on Good Friday from 2018, it has been said that the manner […]

9 years ago

And so the UK sets off on its expedition to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. As Britain gave its formal notification that it is leaving the EU by triggering Article 50, some are high on the improbability of it all. Priti Patel, the Tory minister and Leave campaigner, is said to be pleased her birthday […]

9 years ago

“The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle…Our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home. “ David Foster Wallace The long walk to the cemetery could have been too much at the end of a draining day. Some of […]

9 years ago

Dion Fanning writes about the lessons that Ireland needs to learn, from Tuam and elsewhere, in order to escape the mistakes and the traumas of the past. In 1979, a US mini-series called ‘Holocaust’ was broadcast on West German television. A Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel had previously described it as ‘untrue, offensive and cheap’. Yet […]

9 years ago

“Right through Irish history, and indeed in most countries around the world,” Miriam Donohoe wrote in Tuesday’s Irish Independent, “leaders have had the support of loyal spouses of the opposite sex. It is something that the electorate and public are used to and expect. It is a comfort to them.” There is always someone trying […]

9 years ago

By the end of the week, the Maurice McCabe affair was becoming something more trivial, it was becoming the Enda Kenny story. The unpleasantness or – if you prefer to use the McCabes’ words – the systematic attacks “by agencies of the state” on citizens of the republic, which had been facilitated by some in […]

9 years ago

‘Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the day after that everybody seemed to understand everything.’ – The Plot Against America, Philip Roth. Late last week, one US commentator considered the song which played at the end of every Donald Trump rally and wondered if the next President of […]

10 years ago

There was a time when nostalgia was considered to be a disease. In 1688, a Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer identified this new condition in his country’s soldiers who wanted to go home. The word came from the Greek nostos, the longing for home, and algos, meaning pain. In 1733, a Russian officer was rumoured to […]

10 years ago

Ask Harry Arter about Martin O’Neill’s famed man-management and he’ll tell you how O’Neill used to contact him regularly during the season telling him if he was fit, he would be in the 35-man preliminary squad for the European Championships. But O’Neill tends to go further. On Wednesday, the day Ireland flew out to France […]

10 years ago

Those who think sport and politics don’t mix have never paid much attention to the life of Muhammad Ali. Those who feel that sport is nothing but a triviality have never observed the difference Muhammad Ali made to the lives of those he touched. Equally, those who try to deny that sport  – and life […]

10 years ago