Fintan O'Toole

When we learn to shut down pity, we summon the pitiless to power

Galway’s Druid theatre company had a superb, stubborn belief that a basket case of a nation could also be a Moses basket

State coffers beefed up by huge corporation tax takes, but Government knows it can’t rely on money tree to live forever

July 19th-25th: including Mrs Robinson, Karen Pirie and Baz Luhrmann’s Faraway Downs

The excavation that began on the site of the mother and baby home yesterday is making history in a double sense

Outrage at the collective torture of Gaza is linked to our historical opposition to oppression

Artificial intelligence has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction, so it has to spew out absurd ‘factoids’ instead

Israel successfully created a reality distortion field in which the possible (Iran might get nuclear weapons) obscures the actual (Israel already has them)

The range of departments engaged in this alarming disappearing act suggests it is not accidental

The stark fact is that there are students sitting Junior and Leaving Cert exams today who went to bed hungry last night

Ireland event guide for the week June 7th–13th, 2025: The best movies, music, art and more coming your way

Right from the start of his assault on the population of Gaza, this has been Netanyahu’s mantra

One hopes there is more commonsense to go around

Ten years on, an angry tribe sees itself as more English than British - and Ireland must stay alert to the dangers

If a rich and famous institution such as Columbia doesn’t stand up for itself, what chance have millions of ordinary people?

Women priests: The Catholic Church is like a farmer complaining of a poor crop while ploughing only one depleted field and leaving the rest fallow

Kneecap have every right to make political interventions but they have to recognise they are not mere performance. The fun of “putting it out there” stops when what is out there is violence

We are at a very strange moment in our cultural evolution – one that threatens the very possibility of spiritual experience

Fintan O’Toole: This 30-year debacle should finally bring home to us the reality that official accountability does not exist

When they bought into Trump, the tech bros purchased his whole inflated persona – every whim, craze and dark fantasy

The most effective pushback against Donald Trump right now is a plunging financial graph

There is nothing natural about male violence. Boys are growing up in a profoundly troubled culture

We are the Artful Dodgers of the globalised world, experts at ducking and diving - but even the Dodger gets caught in the end

Being honest about this helps to clarify where Ireland’s real interests lie

Presenter of the Tonight Show on Virgin Media and Hard Shoulder on Newstalk on Denis O’Brien, work-life balance and embarrassing career low-lights

How should Micheál Martin deal with Donald Trump when he meets him in the White House?

They had fooled themselves into believing what they wanted to believe

Fintan O’Toole: Trump is complaining that we pick America’s pocket. Fair enough – we should instead pick America’s brains

The distress, like the devil, is in the details. And yet we owe it to those witnesses to let these details pass through the filters we use to keep the unbearable at bay

The essential question for Ireland is: to grovel or not to grovel?

In allowing himself to appear as the creature of Michael Lowry, the Taoiseach seems oblivious to the damage he is doing to his own character

It’s hard to see how super juniors bringing “their own memos” to cabinet meetings for decision by Government can be lawful

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 knowns

What 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?

There is a statute of limitations on civic virtue as Lowry is openly embraced as the power broker of the new government

When it comes to predicting the future, you might as well ask an astrologer as a rational expert

My family spent Christmas 1997 in New York. I recently found the letters that my then seven-year-old’s classmates wrote to him

Author repeats success with sequel to his debut The Spinning Heart, which won award in 2012

The idea that the Green Party was making us all go too far too fast is the exact opposite of the truth

There 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 be