Fintan O’Toole: The three pillars of Ireland’s political system are crumblingThe three pillars of Irish politics – the Church-State alliance, party tribalism and clientelism – are crumblingTue Jun 06 2023 - 05:15
Fintan O’Toole: The far right gives power to the most obnoxious little gitsWhat would Irish politics really look like if a clever and magnetic leader were to emerge from the far right?Sat Jun 03 2023 - 05:00
Michael Viney was an Englishman who opened up Ireland for Irish people, writes Fintan O’TooleTribute: The late journalist, a sensitive observer of nature and weather, turned an equally sharp eye on Irish societyTue May 30 2023 - 11:30
Fintan O’Toole: What if Sinn Féin makes Northern Ireland viable?Sinn Féin has abandoned both anti-capitalism and the principle of making Northern Ireland unworkable, adopting economic policies that are not much to the left of the Republic’s mainstreamTue May 30 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday allows us to reflect on a dark centuryFintan O’Toole: The centenarian embodies, perhaps more than anyone else, the failure of the United States to learn the moral lessons of the 20th century’s most catastrophic depravitiesSat May 27 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: There’s a reason children have become more violent towards other childrenReferring to children subjected to extreme bullying by their peers as men and women helps us to keep at bay the knowledge that our children inflict violence on other children all the timeTue May 23 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: If we follow the money, the destination is a united IrelandBut it’s not quite that simple. Irish nationalists know that economic self-interest doesn’t determine our political actions and identitiesTue May 16 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: I may well write rubbish, but I don’t write ‘bullshit’The difference between what I would write on a subject and what ChatGPT concocts is that I have an opinion and the bot doesn’tSat May 13 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s giant open-air experiment on property has failedLetting the market decide has been a colossal failure – the Irish economy, left to itself, cannot and will not match capital investment to human needs for shelter and securityTue May 09 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: King Charles’s coronation is £100m worth of retro wrapping paper surrounding a much diminished objectThe problem is that this show is a giant signifier with very little left to signifyFri May 05 2023 - 07:35
Fintan O’Toole: Honouring this fanatical racist by naming clubs after him shames our GAA Association’s achievement in severing links that bind Irish local and national identities to notions of racial superiority being underminedTue May 02 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ground control to Major Leo: your circuit’s dead; there’s something wrongFor an island with a maritime territory seven times its landmass, if development of the offshore wind sector is our moonshot, the entire political system obviously needs a rocket under itSat Apr 29 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: How can Ireland be both filthy rich and bankrupt in ideas and ambitions?Ireland can entice multinational corporations. It can’t entice equitable and available housing, an end to child poverty, coherent planning or a functioning health serviceTue Apr 25 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland has to start believing in its own luck. Fatalism is fatalSo many of the aspirations that fuelled the creation of the State quickly curdled into pious rhetoric at odds with reality. The future was just an attic in which we dumped all our present failuresSat Apr 22 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Talk of Irish ‘coffin ships’ is powerful – but it’s historical fallacyPotent phrase is a touchstone of Irish-American identity. But it is a distorted and retrospective term which does a disservice to migrants drowning at seaTue Apr 18 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Abortion is one of the unstated issues behind Joe Biden’s trip to IrelandBiden plays a low, slow game, and he hopes the coverage from Ireland will drip steadily into the subconscious of some swing votersSat Apr 15 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: JFK embodied an idea of what Ireland aspired to be, Biden embodies an idea of what we used to be Seamless merging of US president’s sense of Irishness with his Catholic faith at odds with how we now see ourselvesTue Apr 11 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Shape of Belfast Agreement was in many respects as predictable as a rabbit in a magician’s hatPolitical theatre helped to disguise the fact that the Belfast Agreement was a conjuring act to wipe the memory that most of it had already been agreed long agoSat Apr 08 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: We must reclaim the great democratic spirit of the 1998 Belfast Agreement Have we used the past 25 years as well as we should have? Undoubtedly notFri Apr 07 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Irish Army’s culture of misogyny is a disgrace and must end hereThe typical offenders are not the rough soldiery but well-educated members of the officer classTue Apr 04 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Those who despise Trump have allowed his real crimes to be overshadowedDonald Trump is revelling in this mad episode which trivialises the serious state of US democracyFri Mar 31 2023 - 15:32
Ireland in the 1980s was a dire place - but then our new patron saint arrivedIf the wafer of the Host was the Church’s miraculous object, Intel’s wafer was the Pentium chip – the beating pulse of the IT revolutionTue Mar 28 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: How journalists were complicit in one of the great con jobs of modern timesThe media played a large role in justifying the invasion of Iraq 20 years agoSat Mar 25 2023 - 05:00
It took a working-class lad from Wigan to make me like rugbyPerhaps we should contemplate the terrifying idea that Andy Farrell has achieved what he has for Ireland not in spite of being English but precisely because he’s EnglishTue Mar 21 2023 - 00:00
Fintan O’Toole: Burke family values are reflected in Irish ConstitutionThe Burke family believe what Bunreacht na hÉireann says we’re all supposed to believe. Let's drop God from our ConstitutionSat Mar 18 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Gary Lineker debacle is all part of the continuing saga of Britain eating itselfYou can cancel people who make stupid comments on social media. Or you can take a measured approachTue Mar 14 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: You have to be middle-aged before you can become middle-class in IrelandBy my mid-20s I owned a home, had a third-level education and a white-collar job. It’s very different for that age group todaySat Mar 11 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: What unionists should really be fretting about is their love for Britain is increasingly unrequited Opinion: There will be no Westminster revolt over the Windsor FrameworkTue Mar 07 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: A cold-blooded continuity links Kerry Babies scandal and Ballyseedy massacreIn the violent circumstances of its birth, the State acquired habits that were very hard to shake offSat Mar 04 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: DUP must confront truth that its own actions detached North from British mothershipNorthern Ireland protocol row has been a reality distortion field – it has made realities seem illusory and illusions seem realTue Feb 28 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: People screaming abuse at asylum seekers are not stupid. They do it because they enjoy itThe toxic ideas of a century ago have seeped back into currency. A third of Americans now say they believe in the Great ReplacementSat Feb 25 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The West is pursuing different agendas in UkraineSupporting Ukraine is costing the US a mere 5.6% of its annual military budget. In return, it gets to degrade Russia’s military capacity by 50% – so farWed Feb 22 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Why it is so good to have Bertie back about the placeAs a living relic of old indecency. Bertie Ahern is a valuable reminder of how things used to be in IrelandSat Feb 18 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: At every stage of this extraordinary saga, the State knew it was acting unlawfullyAttorney General’s report on nursing home charges masks basic question of how a democracy should respond to violation of constitutional order in layers of evasionTue Feb 14 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Well-off Irish people do the most climate damage and must pay the priceCosts of carbon reduction should not be ‘shared’ equally but must be borne mainly by the richSat Feb 11 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: State has a habit of paying up to the strong and harassing the weakDepartment of Health did not challenge those who refused to pay nursing home fees. It hammered only those who were too poor to hire a lawyerTue Feb 07 2023 - 00:01
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland still lacking the sense of shared space needed for unity to become a realityFintan O’Toole: If a Border poll is going to happen, it will be crucial the proposition is not just a sloganSat Feb 04 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The ‘great national drama’ of Brexit has lapsed into sullen silenceThe poorest people in Ireland now have a standard of living 63% higher than their counterparts in BritainTue Jan 31 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Enoch Burke is no freak. His extreme logic was part of Irish education for yearsThis country has often allowed the rights of those who believe they are acting in God’s name to trump those of studentsFri Jan 27 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Irish ‘moral hazard’ means being bailed out by the State if you build a slumEdifice of private responsibility has been demolished, replaced with a facade of public liability still costing the Government billionsTue Jan 24 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Putin’s gamble was based on his contemptuous estimate of the democratic world. He was wrongThe least the democratic world owes to the dead in Ukraine is the determination to stop sleepwalking towards its own destruction. There’s five big things we have learned from Putin’s follySat Jan 21 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland faces a rising threat from a far-right that is growing in ambitionProtests against refugees are fuelled by misinformation and a residual element seeking to hate an ‘Other’Tue Jan 17 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Is the State producing higher levels of education than it can employ? Is there a generation that is potentially open to the idea of very radical change? Almost certainlySat Jan 14 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s dysfunctional health service crushes idealism and rewards cynicismWhy is the culture so resistant to positive change? Three historical reasons suggest themselvesTue Jan 10 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: We have taken flight from deep link with birds Birds animate our physical world but so many species in Ireland are rapidly winging it towards extinctionSat Jan 07 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Elevation of child poverty to national priority a genuine political breakthroughIn a country sensitised to child abuse, we seem oddly reluctant to accept that official neglect is also abusiveTue Jan 03 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Half a century on we can see the benefits of Ireland joining Europe’s top tableState joined the EEC immediately after the bloodiest year in the history of the TroublesSat Dec 31 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: I don’t miss the Ireland that required us to marry in secretIreland’s present is not perfect but its past was grim, one of hypocrisy and economic failureTue Dec 27 2022 - 00:00
Fintan O’Toole: We are living with the possibility of no future, of civilisation coming towards its end‘2022 was a year when the post-lockdown dawn turned out to be the morning after the night before’Sat Dec 24 2022 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Musk’s tantrum capitalism explodes myth of buccaneering libertarianismRampant egomania is not creation. It is not even, in the jargon of neoliberalism, creative destruction. It is merely destructionTue Dec 20 2022 - 05:00
