Fintan O’Toole: DUP has done the most for a united IrelandUnionist party’s idiocy and sleazy behaviour threatens Northern Ireland’s foundationsTue Jan 31 2017 - 08:15
Fintan O’Toole: Brexit resurrects the English cult of heroic failureMove to leave the EU feeds into the British taste for celebrating disasters as triumphsTue Jan 24 2017 - 09:08
Fintan O’Toole: President Donald Trump is an authoritarian and anarchistUS president’s cabinet is like a punk band with members chosen for inability to performFri Jan 20 2017 - 20:00
Fintan O’Toole: DUP must be punished for its Brexit follyNever mind ‘cash for ash’, the party has trashed Northern Ireland’s vital interestsTue Jan 17 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Martin McGuinness, a hard man to replaceAs deputy first minister he showed the same determination with which he led the IRASat Jan 14 2017 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole on Maeve Brennan: No fairy tale endingFirst published on January 1st, 1998, this essay helped revive interest in a once neglected but now highly-regarded Irish writerFri Jan 13 2017 - 06:00
TK Whitaker, supreme mandarin and good citizen - Fintan O’Toole’s assessmentIreland’s greatest conservative revolutionary forced the state to alter the way it saw itselfTue Jan 10 2017 - 07:21
Fintan O’Toole: the alt-right is old fascism in new clothesLike most viruses, fascism adapts to changing environments and it’s just as deadlyTue Jan 10 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Silence is a weapon for fighting oblivionFor the Irish, silence is a way of dealing with, and surviving, traumatic exileFri Jan 06 2017 - 13:00
Fintan O’Toole: Irish banks have got away with major fraudGardaí have yet to investigate how thousands were tricked into switching mortgagesTue Jan 03 2017 - 09:56
2017: Fintan O’Toole plays optimist and pessimistIt could be the year of anarcho-authoritarianism – or the world may come to its sensesSat Dec 31 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Anthony Cronin, a true man of lettersBut his standing as a public intellectual is coloured by his relationship with HaugheyWed Dec 28 2016 - 16:47
Fintan O’Toole: We should imagine the abyss so we don’t fall into itWe live in a post-postwar world but the lessons of history must not be forgottenTue Dec 27 2016 - 05:00
Four Sides Full review: delicate portrait that spills out of its frameFintan O’Toole on poet Vona Groarke’s elegant, moving meditation on the pain of lost loveSat Dec 24 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole’s cultural highlights: ‘A great year for the elderly’Culture review 2016: Seanad National Museum land grab shows depths of philistinism in our political cultureThu Dec 22 2016 - 09:27
Fintan O’Toole: The Irish Christmas is a fiction of homeBeneath the seasonal franticity is something fragile, fleeting and preciousTue Dec 20 2016 - 11:03
‘Post-truth’ should not be the word of 2016Technology has helped big lies breed and multiply. Grand-scale political lying can go hand in hand with violence, oppression and catastropheSat Dec 17 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Still no shame in helping yourself to other people’s moneyINM pensions scandal shows there is no unacceptable face of Irish capitalismTue Dec 13 2016 - 05:00
Collected Plays by Brian Friel review: 29 survivors of their maker’s cullsA fine edition gives some of the great playwright’s murdered darlings a second chanceSat Dec 10 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Tax U-turns make eejits of compliant citizensTime and again, those of us who pay property and water taxes are made to feel like foolsTue Dec 06 2016 - 05:00
Seanad has learned nothing from its near death experienceUpper chamber’s arrogance shows nothing but contempt for the National MuseumsFri Dec 02 2016 - 14:00
An Irish Trump? He's called Michael O'LearyThe Ryanair boss could sweep to power with help from complacent establishmentTue Nov 29 2016 - 08:33
Fintan O’Toole: social injustice grew during austerityIreland was one of the worst EU countries at preserving fairness in face of recessionTue Nov 22 2016 - 06:25
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre review: The best single volume on the subjectThe handbook rightly fixes Dion Boucicault as a founding figure and brings Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw back into the frameSat Nov 19 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland must join the fight for decencyThe EU, as bad as it is, is the only bloc left that can reassert open democracyTue Nov 15 2016 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: The cluster of global crises that created Donald TrumpDonald Trump’s election is the United States’ reaction to a series of huge problems: democracy is broken, inequality is growing, masculinity is undergoing rapid changeSat Nov 12 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: The United Hates of America has raised its middle finger to the worldThere is still another America, an America that will wake up feeling it has lost its countryWed Nov 09 2016 - 08:08
Fintan O'Toole: Trump is a symptom not the diseaseVictory for Clinton would not mark end of crisis of democracy in United StatesTue Nov 08 2016 - 05:00
Oscar Wilde’s suffering makes holy ground of Reading GaolFintan O'Toole visits the cell where Wilde was imprisoned, and finds it haunted by the ghosts of more anonymous victimsFri Nov 04 2016 - 15:00
Fintan O’Toole: Why social partnership needs to be revivedThe system had flaws under Bertie Ahern but it did three indispensable thingsTue Nov 01 2016 - 06:06
In 2016, official Ireland trusted artists. Please do it againMost striking about the official cultural commemoration events of 2016 is how unofficial they have been. Reverence has been notable by its absence, as has cynicismSat Oct 29 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Why some papers are ignoring a report on Irish mediaThe coverage of a study of media ownership confirms how much the issue mattersTue Oct 25 2016 - 06:15
Fintan O’Toole: Britain’s Irish question becomes Ireland’s English questionA soft, ambiguous and contingent Brexit could be possible – with Ireland’s helpFri Oct 21 2016 - 15:59
Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville review: Utterly delightfulThe least likely memoirist shows why he is the greatest living master of simile and metaphor in prose, writes Fintan O'TooleThu Oct 20 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Is a woman who has an abortion as depraved as a child rapist?Even Donald Trump withdrew his call to punish women who have abortionsTue Oct 18 2016 - 06:50
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: Irish road to modernity has no straight linesThe collective works in our series show how molten and defiant Irish artworks can beSat Oct 15 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Budget might as well have been announced in a fairy fort in LeitrimFinancial plan is a tribal ritual, not a serious exercise in democratic scrutinyTue Oct 11 2016 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: We are living with the politics of a pathetic 15-year-old boyTrump, UKIP and much of the new populist right across Europe have the idiotic swagger of the hormonally deranged schoolboySat Oct 08 2016 - 15:07
Culture Shock: Sparks fly in ‘Swan Lake/Loch na hEala’ and ‘These Rooms’Dublin Theatre Festival is staging thrilling blends of dance and drama by Michael Keegan-Dolan, Anu and CoisCéimFri Oct 07 2016 - 15:23
Fintan O’Toole: Why the silence? What’s outrageous in Gaza is no less so in AleppoAmerican indifference to “collateral damage” no more evil than Russian cynicism about the deaths of about 320 civilians, including 100 children, since ceasefire endedWed Oct 05 2016 - 13:00
Fintan O’Toole: Problem for Jadotville survivors is they did not dieMy uncle could have bragged about Jadotville – but he never didTue Oct 04 2016 - 06:54
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 2013 – Parallax, by Sinéad MorrisseyThe poet grew up in the heat of the Troubles, but her work avoids any direct reckoningSat Oct 01 2016 - 04:30
Ancient Rain review: seems designed to tantalise us with what might have beenDublin Theatre Festival: Irish poems set to music beg the question - why?Fri Sept 30 2016 - 12:57
Fintan O’Toole: Anti-abortion ‘zygopaths’ make a mockery of equalityIt is wrong to equate a woman to a group of cells at the moment of conceptionTue Sept 27 2016 - 12:59
Fintan O’Toole: Between aspiration and reality we build a bridge of bullshitThere is nothing wrong with having high hopes, but action plan for education is an exercise in denialTue Sept 20 2016 - 05:00
My personal presidency: Michael D Higgins talks to Fintan O’TooleThe President discusses the poverty of his early life, his health, his future and the struggles of the Irish RepublicSat Sept 17 2016 - 06:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 2011 – Laundry, by Louise LoweBy staging her play in a former Magdalene laundry the playwright compels the audience to inhabit the haunted spaces of Irish historySat Sept 17 2016 - 04:30
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is being held back by fearUnderneath our bluster is an insecurity that prevents us from adapting to the changing worldTue Sept 13 2016 - 01:25
Fintan O’Toole: The love-hate relationship between Ireland and BritainAn Irish Times series explores Ireland’s relationship with its bigger, more powerful neighbour, our changing levels of enmity and amity and the small – yet vast – differences that define the two countriesSat Sept 10 2016 - 06:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 2010 – Room, by Emma DonoghueThe Dublin author’s book is an intensification of the common experience of having a child, in all its claustrophobic terror and glorySat Sept 10 2016 - 04:30
