Fintan O'Toole

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

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-Ex

What audiences are told before gigs at St James’ Church says it all: turn off your phone and just be in the moment

The State is entering a holding pattern, circling a future somewhere between high anxiety and extraordinary opportunity

State’s short-term future is shaped simultaneously by wild optimism and existential anxiety

The 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 better

Vigorous and critically minded history proves that the shifting and sometimes contradictory ‘social construct’ of Irish America cannot be reduced to one singular identity

The far right has been much better than the left at giving voters the illusion that it has an accurate map across these liminal spaces

The expansion of the State is no longer a lefty position in Irish politics. It is pretty much everybody’s position

It is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think 'this too will pass'

No prosecutions, no financial costs, no names and damn all shame

Fintan O’Toole: Fintan O’Toole: US voters have had had ample warning as the former president has set out his intentions quite explicitly

Dress Cardinal McDonald and her bishops in episcopal robes and it’s a movie we’ve all seen before

Take Ireland’s top manufacturer of insulation - not Kingspan, but the HSE. It creates layers of impenetrable padding between political decision-makers and the consequences

Israel 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 enmity

We 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…'

My comedic, commercial fiction has been described as ‘fluffy’ or ‘an easy read’ more times than my heart and ego can take

Hey, 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 country

Plus, what the writer said in conversation with Fintan O’Toole in the National Concert Hall on Saturday

Somehow we can only feel pain of abused and abandoned children in safe retrospect, when it is brought to light after decades underground

The central, compelling argument is that public space is a vital but sorely neglected component of a functioning democracy

We called the predatory paedophile in my school Little Plum. We all learned early the required habits of toxic silence

The 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 treatments

The 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 watch

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 Biden

The eejits who get caught have been hooked by algorithms engineered by social media companies

The immigration policies of all political parties warrant scrutiny

Ireland 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 themselves

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 doing

To watch a good man, a remarkably effective president and a courageous battler against adversity reduced to such frailty was unbearable

Protofascist 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 leader