Monday, March 22, 2010 Previous editions
THEY might not quite constitute a “new Republic”, but Fine Gael’s proposals for constitutional reform, to be launched by Enda Kenny today, deserve to be debated seriously.
IT’S the word of the century so far. Just when the search engine launched back in 1998 became a verb — “to google” — no one quite knows, but many of us google something, anything, dozens of times a day.
I WAS in Dubai at the weekend. Nice enough place if you like that kind of thing: glitzy, a bit soulless, but after the weather we’ve been having at home, who’s complaining?
THE space shuttle Endeavour touched down in Florida early on Monday morning after a successful two-week mission to the international space station.
BRITAIN, it seems, is drowning in a vale of tears. One after another, in the run-up to their general election, British politicians are lining up to emote in public. Never before have so many cried so easily, so openly and so often.
WITH perhaps 50,000 Muslims now living in Ireland, it’s imperative we find a modus vivendi. No one pretends it’s going to be easy but there is no alternative to trying.
IT’S 125 years old this year and if some reports are to be believed, the Orange Card is still the one the British Tories feel should be played. It was Sir Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who coined the phrase in the aftermath of the 1885 election and it continues to have a chilly resonance for nationalists.
WHO will ever forget January 20, 2009? In America and around the world, it was truly a great day. It shouldn’t have mattered but for someone of colour to assume leadership of what we used to call the “free world” counted for quite a lot.
THE news from Haiti is always terrible. No Haitian news doesn’t mean good Haitian news, merely that the long, slow Haitian catastrophe is continuing as usual.
ARE those Northerners sick, you might well ask? Their vital political institutions might be on the brink of collapse and what are they doing? Laughing their heads off, that’s what.
HE WAS only little – about two, I would say – and a bit scruffy, his feet barely touching the floor as he was dragged along the Tesco aisle by his mother who was carrying a shopping basket and also pushing a buggy containing a younger brother or sister. She let him go for a minute, distracted by the choice of soft drinks, and he sat down and started to pull plastic bottles of mineral water off the lowest shelf.
I LIKE to think I’m not old enough to play golf but my youngest brother has been fascinated and obsessed with it from an early age, so that excuse won’t wash.
TOMORROW and on Friday we will brave the busiest travelling days of the year to be with our families, or they come to us depending on whose turn it is to host. It’s as if the whole country stands up in a mass game of musical chairs, everyone scrambling to land somewhere, somehow at a table with a turkey and a plum pudding.
AS the Taoiseach prepares to leave for Copenhagen, we are told there are only a few hours left in which to save the planet. For all that is at stake though — entire nations vanishing and millions losing their homes to rising seas — I suspect the read-out from the conference-of-all-conferences will be rather less intently followed than, say, last week’s budget or even the X Factor result, come to think of it.
IT is said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In relation to Dáil elections, that is broadly true. In 1957 and 1961, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael between them secured 81% - 82% of the popular vote. Come 2007, an economic transformation and a 30-odd year terrorist campaign later, that had dipped, but only slightly, to 77.5%.
LIKE most people from one of the minority faiths, I intended to maintain a discrete silence on the revelations about child rape and the surrounding cover-up documented in Judge Yvonne Murphy’s report last week, except to relate one anecdote.
GREAT news. Green shoots, at last. One of the key drivers of the Irish economy has officially emerged from recession. Yes, the Cassandras are back in business. What with bombs here and shootings there, the Troubles junkies can hardly believe their luck.
SO how was it for you? Good, bad or indifferent? It can’t have been that bad, I guess: you’re reading this so that means you got through to the end. What am I banging on about? The first decade of the 21st century, of course. It’s hard to believe it’s in its dying days: I can still remember the hangover from what we learned to call “millennium night”. But time speeds up as we get older, I’m finding.
IF YOU have only read one economics book — and one is, understandably, too many for some people — it was probably Freakonomics.
THERE’S a sort of poetic justice to it: having written back in April about the danger to mental health arising from swine flu hysteria, I have now come down with the bug myself. Perhaps 100,000 people in the State have likewise been struck.
ONE of the biggest and most keenly awaited trials of the past half century opened on Monday but without the benefit of the defendant. The infamous Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs’ political leader during the Bosnian war of 1992-’95 which left at least 100,000 dead, refused to attend because he said he needs more time to prepare his defence.
Perhaps inevitably, Andrew’s account of MI5’s activities in relation to the Provisionals is not a full one, although interesting new details emerge.
In the real world, there is no way the Conservatives would spend their first months in power expending political capital on a referendum on Europe if Lisbon had already been ratified. As a political priority, Britain’s debt crisis puts Europe in the shade. But can they just hack the treaty? That seems unlikely too
As it is, though, Hollywood apart, most Americans seem to think that Polanski must have what is coming to him and that those who call for bygones to be bygones fail to understand that the law is bigger than any of thosewho break it.
America divides opinion, but we all have an opinion. For most of the world it is, in some sense, their second home even if they have never been there, so great is its impact on our lives. But is America in decline, finished even? Many respected intellectuals and most of the media elite seem to think so.
America divides opinion, but we all have an opinion. For most of the world it is, in some sense, their second home even if they have never been there, so great is its impact on our lives. But is America in decline, finished even? Many respected intellectuals and most of the media elite seem to think so.
WE all know that Albert Reynolds, Taoiseach from 1992 to 1994, hasn’t always enjoyed the kindest press. It’s not just The Sunday Times that has been harsh.
Drug use remains illegal in Portugal. People are still stopped by the police and have their drugs confiscated. But drug use there is seen as a health, not a judicial, issue. Crucially, anyone caught with less than what is determined to be a 10-day personal supply is not arrested and does not face jail
But antipathy to nuclear power has become a kind of secular religion, based almost entirely on superstition and bad science. It is the sine qua non of what Lenin once called ‘infantile leftism’. Nuclear power was opposed at least partly because it seemed to imply a commitment to a nuclear military industry and thus nuclear weapons
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