Justine McCarthy

Throughout the general election campaign, voters were assured that a future Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government would support the existing Bill. Yet soon after Christmas, the mood music changed

The worship of mammon and mammon-makers has brought us to the point where a rich felon purports to rule the world and carve it up to his liking

European leaders are bracing themselves as Trump’s return to the White House has plunged the Continent into a precarious era. Evidently, the memo has failed to reach Dáil Éireann

How can our new government claim to be an international referee of political integrity when it has shamelessly thrown away its moral compass?

Michael D Higgins, a funny-sounding little poet heaving with lofty thoughts, was exactly what the doctor ordered for Ireland in 2011

I’m taking the Julius Caesar approach to resolutions: here are the ways I’d like the rest of you to adopt better habits

Flinging the anti-Semitism slur around is an injustice to the many Israeli citizens who decry their government’s protracted killing spree in Gaza and the illegal settlements in the West Bank

If 14 years’ tribunal work by a High Court judge can be so readily air-brushed by successive governments, what’s the point of bothering?

In all the Mercs-and-perks talk about who will get which Cabinet portfolios, there has been scant appetite to face down the warmongers in Jerusalem and Washington

It’s just 14 years since Fianna Fáil and Martin were being written off completely, and four since his leadership was being publicly challenged

In the space of a single week, two sports stars were before the Irish courts having behaved despicably

By embracing abortion in the 1970s, feminism accepted that pregnancy is damaging to women’s lives, rather than something fundamental to human experience

The shameful and eternal truth about the Irish left is that as long as it stands apart, it falls apart

US election shows voters still demand that a woman candidate must be without fault

The prevailing credo is that the voter is always right, even when the voter is egregiously misguided

When election candidates coming knocking at your door, will you speak for the children so badly let down by the State?

The blizzard of scandals since the Dáil returned from summer holidays is Mary Lou McDonald’s GUBU moment

Why is the International Criminal Court taking nearly five months to respond to the request for Netanyahu’s arrest warrant when it took just three weeks to grant one for Putin?

Despite a history of public relations gaffes, Hogan’s muscular political skills seem to endear him to the party chief, with Simon Harris the fourth to entrust him with a key role

Even the most interfering nanny state cannot guarantee that a baby boost is actually spent on the child

Ireland's age of innocence as a global love object is over

The €13bn lying in an escrow fund could help give those hit by the homelessness crisis a way back into society

Sometimes, when a problem is complex and protracted, a simple example of hubristic extravagance can become the emblem of all that is wrong

The Gulf Stream that once bathed our shores in mildness has turned into a giant sunblock that could be bottled and sold

Owning a media lodestar can be the ultimate ego trip as Elon Musk demonstrated with his travesty of an ‘interview’ with Donald Trump

Alliance of green and orange sectarian supremacists in Belfast shows fascism is on the march and is leveraging the new global weapon of mass destruction: gullibility

The Kilkenny woman changed how the legal system deals with sexual offences

Where once the priest was a respected public figure in a crisis, self-appointed supremacists now fill the role

Potential new TDs would need their mental acuity assessed if they were not given pause by hearing about masked protesters outside the Taoiseach’s home

Wisdom, that great compensation for the vanished stamina of youth, seems to have bypassed the US president

Regular reports of disturbing cases show the State has again been failing our most vulnerable children

There should be monuments in all our cities to the women who have helped to civilise this country

Elected representatives are honour-bound to explain their words and actions to their constituents who rely on professional media outlets. The alternative source is the swamp of social media and fake news websites

Imagine anyone calling Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Indira Gandhi ‘the girls’

Opinion polling is not dark force. But as it becomes more complex, its impacts needs to be examined

We voters need to consider our ambivalence about political standards

Amid all the woes of homelessness, exorbitant rents, asylum seekers consigned to tents and climate damage, this was a moment to relish being Irish

Ireland chooses to be an outlier in Europe by not operating a consultant-led helicopter emergency service that would bring life-saving expertise to the scene of an accident

Even when propaganda is shown to be untrue, Israel’s backers make no apology for having blindingly believed it

When trust dies, anger is its natural successor. Only by regaining the people’s trust can Ireland recover