IT’S commonplace in our public conversation to deify Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, but the connection between Irishness and racism is studiously avoided. Its uncomfortable, it’s ingrained, but it’s a deeply unattractive part of us.

It is at the moment of reform that an enfeebled state is most vulnerable. 

HALF of us signed up for water charges and have been made mugs of. Instead of a pay-as-you-use system, delivering revenues sufficient to make a quantum difference to a shambolic but essential infrastructure, a flat charge is coming.

We are in a national debate premised on the view that nature is like a bucket of coal to be burnt. Water is not a resource, a utility to be used — much less a so-called human ‘right’.

Most Fine Gael TDs are out of their comfort zones in attempting empathy with the unwashed, suggests Gerard Howlin. 

TWO THINGS I pleasurably waste a lot of time on are property supplements and travel websites.

Unlike many other recent political memoirs, this book pulls few punches and is an authentic transcription of the acuity, caustic manners and occasional bias of the man, writes Gerard Howlin

MÁIRIA Cahill’s case is not primarily about sexual abuse. It is about abuse, and abuse is about power. 

THE big hoopla wasn’t the Budget yesterday, it will be the public-sector pay talks next year. Politically and fiscally, that is where the real action is.

Gerard Howlin argues that for the radical left same-sex marriage is simply patriarchy reincarnated in drag.