Why does Micheál Martin allow himself to look so comfortable with shady deals?In allowing himself to appear as the creature of Michael Lowry, the Taoiseach seems oblivious to the damage he is doing to his own characterTue Feb 04 2025 - 06:00
An unfortunate incident of photobombing at the Áras highlights big problem for our democracyIt’s hard to see how super juniors bringing “their own memos” to cabinet meetings for decision by Government can be lawfulTue Jan 28 2025 - 06:00
Rub your head for a new university in Kilgarvan - just don’t call it a ‘deal’In the grey zones between deal and no deal, nothing will be written down for prying eyes to discover under FOI. We are back in the land of the unknown knownsTue Jan 21 2025 - 06:06
Five years after Covid, we scorn health workers, ignore vaccines and work in our officesWhat happened to the need to end commuting and presenteeism? Or to our gratitude for healthcare workers or our resolution to change how we care for older people?Tue Jan 14 2025 - 06:00
It’s a national indignity that the new government will rely on Michael LowryThere is a statute of limitations on civic virtue as Lowry is openly embraced as the power broker of the new governmentTue Jan 07 2025 - 06:00
Ten predictions experts made about the world in 2025. All of them are wrongWhen it comes to predicting the future, you might as well ask an astrologer as a rational expertTue Dec 31 2024 - 07:05
‘My grandad is dead. I am going to tennis today’: Christmas letters to my son, 1997My family spent Christmas 1997 in New York. I recently found the letters that my then seven-year-old’s classmates wrote to himTue Dec 24 2024 - 06:50
We’re heading for the second biggest fiscal disaster in the history of the StateThe idea that the Green Party was making us all go too far too fast is the exact opposite of the truthTue Dec 17 2024 - 07:25
‘Spit on me Dickie!’ scandalised the Church. But Rock was more safety valve than satanic threatThere were soon much more exotic ways to be a teenager than going into violent hysterics for Dickie Rock, but for a time, he filled the gap between who Irish teenagers were and who they were supposed to beTue Dec 10 2024 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole on his career: ‘You had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you’The Irish Times columnist has made a new documentary about his life for RTÉ. Here he looks back on a career that he began as the Michelangelo of Tipp-ExSat Dec 07 2024 - 05:15
Irish voters keep doing the same things and expecting different resultsThe State is entering a holding pattern, circling a future somewhere between high anxiety and extraordinary opportunityMon Dec 02 2024 - 07:00
Ireland may soon be expelled naked from the fiscal Garden of EdenState’s short-term future is shaped simultaneously by wild optimism and existential anxietyTue Nov 26 2024 - 07:00
The three transparent election lies even politicians can’t pretend to believeThe extremely self-conscious uncoupling of the two centre-right parties is so obviously an act, it’s like a game of cards in which the stakes are matchsticks. But Sinn Féin isn’t much betterTue Nov 19 2024 - 06:00
The Routledge History of Irish America: A vast and comprehensive study of all aspects of the Irish-American experienceVigorous and critically minded history proves that the shifting and sometimes contradictory ‘social construct’ of Irish America cannot be reduced to one singular identitySat Nov 16 2024 - 05:00
We have entered a no man’s land, an age of dizzying transitionsThe far right has been much better than the left at giving voters the illusion that it has an accurate map across these liminal spacesTue Nov 12 2024 - 06:00
An unhappy Ireland prepares for a general electionThe expansion of the State is no longer a lefty position in Irish politics. It is pretty much everybody’s positionFri Nov 08 2024 - 06:00
Donald Trump’s openly authoritarian instincts are about to be unleashedIt is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think 'this too will pass'Thu Nov 07 2024 - 02:30
What has happened to the cowboys who built defective apartments? Absolutely nothingNo prosecutions, no financial costs, no names and damn all shameTue Nov 05 2024 - 06:25
Fintan O’Toole: Trump 2.0 will see US become a fascist state, tempered by senility and greedFintan O’Toole: Fintan O’Toole: US voters have had had ample warning as the former president has set out his intentions quite explicitlyTue Oct 29 2024 - 08:00
Sinn Féin responds to child abuse more or less as the Catholic hierarchy didDress Cardinal McDonald and her bishops in episcopal robes and it’s a movie we’ve all seen beforeTue Oct 22 2024 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Politicians are in a long-distance relationship with the consequences of their decisionsTake Ireland’s top manufacturer of insulation - not Kingspan, but the HSE. It creates layers of impenetrable padding between political decision-makers and the consequencesTue Oct 15 2024 - 06:00
I take no pleasure in saying that Hamas is winningIsrael is putting all its eggs in Donald Trump’s grubby basket, banking on an alliance with a man whose friendship tends to be more toxic than his enmityTue Oct 08 2024 - 06:00
Government has a windfall of cash but no coherent sense of how to spend itWe have a windfall – but the golden apples seem to have fallen on our heads. Our governing culture has lost its great get-out clause: ‘If only we had the money…'Mon Sept 30 2024 - 12:15
It’s all eyes on the election now and children don’t have a voteHey, kids – we have a roadmap. Just hang on in there and try not to get too angry and ashamed about being poor in a rich countryTue Sept 24 2024 - 06:00
Ireland fixates on the ghosts of the past, and is blind to the abuses still happeningSomehow we can only feel pain of abused and abandoned children in safe retrospect, when it is brought to light after decades undergroundTue Sept 17 2024 - 06:00
Schools sexual abuse inquiry: It was open season on children’s bodies. These men did what they likedWe called the predatory paedophile in my school Little Plum. We all learned early the required habits of toxic silenceTue Sept 10 2024 - 06:00
The cataract bus is, like all great Irish inventions, the fruit of carelessness and clientelismThe bus to Belfast for cataract surgery is a brilliant bit of political entrepreneurship, but it clouds the reality that healthcare is a right and we, the public, pay for all these treatmentsTue Sept 03 2024 - 06:11
Behind Kamala Harris’s megawatt smile at the convention, I saw a ruthless machine at workThe Democrats have generated an equal and opposite reaction to their own culpable inertia, a unity of purpose that makes them much more like the Republicans. It’s not always pretty to watchTue Aug 27 2024 - 06:11
How apt that Democratic convention marks the passing of the last old-style Irish Catholic politician The 1968 convention was the last hurrah for a phenomenon of huge importance in our own history: the Irish-American political machine. How apt that this week’s convention will mark the reluctant end of the career of Joe BidenTue Aug 20 2024 - 06:15
One law for megarich provocateur Elon Musk, another for the poor idiots who followThe eejits who get caught have been hooked by algorithms engineered by social media companiesTue Aug 13 2024 - 06:00
Fintan O'Toole: Ireland has gone from an emigrant society to an immigrant-emigrant societyIreland has become far better at creating jobs, and like every other place where there are work opportunities, it attracts people who want to make a better life for themselvesTue Aug 06 2024 - 06:00
With all the confidence of a hostage in a ransom video, Catherine Martin began dismantling RTÉ No one in Government has put forward any justification for hollowing out RTÉ. But, in an age when trusted information has never been more vital to the defence of democracy, that is what it is doingTue Jul 30 2024 - 06:00
Joe Biden has ended the agony. The Democrats now have a fighting chance to save the American republicTo watch a good man, a remarkably effective president and a courageous battler against adversity reduced to such frailty was unbearableMon Jul 22 2024 - 12:56
The far right is just a Farage away from breaking through in Irish politicsProtofascist ideas are at least as prevalent in Ireland as in other Western democracies and the reactionary, nativist mindset is well established here. All the movement is lacking is a leaderTue Jul 16 2024 - 06:00
For his already fanatical devotees Trump’s survival will add to his messianic appealThat Trump became a victim of the very violence he has done so much to validate will not provoke either him or his fans to think again. It will merely serve to fortify a mindset in which America is already at war with itselfMon Jul 15 2024 - 05:59
Welcome to adventure holiday politics ... white-water rafting with Brexit, bungee jumping with TrumpTo put it crudely, a big part of the appeal of Brexit was scale. It felt like a very big thing to do, just as, later in 2016, electing a celebrity non-politician to the White House felt bigMon Jul 08 2024 - 11:03
Fintan O’Toole: Democrats and their media allies pretended everything was fine. It’s not fineFintan O’Toole: If the Democrats persist with Joe Biden, the United States is in imminent danger of being handed back to a Trump who is vastly more malign than he was in 2016Tue Jul 02 2024 - 06:30
Cathal Crotty’s suspended sentence another example of how judicial system is failing womenThe administration of justice for violent men is out of kilter with our values and we can no longer suspend disbeliefTue Jun 25 2024 - 06:00
Failure to prevent destruction of records is a further insult to those whose identities were stolenTo treat these records with such contempt is to repeat the contempt shown by Church and State to thousands of women and childrenTue Jun 18 2024 - 06:00
Sinn Féin was the shock absorber of Irish politics. It’s worn outLocal and European elections: Don’t be fooled by the Coalition parties’ electoral success. The right is risingMon Jun 10 2024 - 14:27
There’s one fundamental reason why we have a housing crisisThe wealthier the State has become, the more money it shells just to find homeless families a bed for the nightTue Jun 04 2024 - 06:00
Ireland is poor at innovation, but a world-class producer of complacency and self-satisfactionIt’s not about the failure of lone geniuses to have eureka moments in the bath. It’s not caused by the lack of work ethic. It’s about the collective environmentTue May 28 2024 - 06:00
Tony O’Reilly’s secret past shaped his need to play the life of an Ascendancy landlordIt’s hard to avoid the belief that something of his anomalous origins must have been present in what O’Reilly becameMon May 20 2024 - 12:00
Dublin portal reminds us that our capital has an uneasy edge of wildnessFintan O’Toole: The erection of the portal linking night-time inner city Dublin to daytime New York was a heroic act of denialSat May 18 2024 - 06:00
One of the two main museums dedicated to memory of Great Famine has disappeared. That’s astonishingThat the world’s largest collection of visual art and printed materials relating to the Great Famine is in storage in America is a grim story of what happens when a nation fails to take ownership of a central part of its own historyTue May 14 2024 - 06:00
A hard Border is now a patriotic cause - and we laughed at the British for that kind of nonsenseGiving these gifts to the 'Ireland is full' mob borders on the insane.Tue May 07 2024 - 06:00
Catastrophic decline of wild Irish salmon is another of the slow scandals of Irish lifeOver the last few decades, we’ve driven the salmon from our rivers, recklessly but ruthlesslyTue Apr 30 2024 - 06:00
Have we ditched the Stardust-era stereotype that the working classes are wild and reckless?Both reports unknowingly unleashed demons of prejudice that were hidden in the Id of the Irish establishment.Tue Apr 23 2024 - 06:00
We are facing the terrifying result of the West’s three stupid mistakes in the Middle East In Jerusalem and Tehran, there are people who pray for ArmageddonMon Apr 15 2024 - 13:09
If Israel succeeds in Gaza, it will drag the West down with itIsrael is the child of the very international order it is now helping to destroyTue Apr 09 2024 - 06:00
