Saturday, July 31, 2010 Previous editions
A FACEBOOK friend messaged last week to ask: “Have you not read The Spirit Level?” Did he mean Seamus Heaney’s poetry collection or the acclaimed book published last year arguing that income inequality is the cause of most social problems?
AS Charlie Haughey might have put it, I think there is some dissatisfaction with the (FF) leadership at the moment. Forty years ago, in the wake of the Arms Trial, the issue was policy; today, the grumblers claim their differences with the Taoiseach are presentational.
THE animated state of the stag hunting debate is indicative of the deathly state of Irish politics more generally.
WE all need a place to run and hide, a place to think sometimes. For me, oftentimes, it is no further than the bottom of the garden with a cup of tea, a newspaper and perhaps a cigarette.
SO has justice finally been delivered? Years late and at great financial cost, the Bloody Sunday inquiry has finally reported.
IN my first year at Queen’s in Belfast, no subject exercised the monthly meetings of the students’ union more than the name of the hall where our meetings were held.
LAST Wednesday was probably the hardest day of my life. At the grand old age of 37, I thought I was too young to be carrying the coffin of my partner.
HOW do you solve a problem like Iran? As Richard Haas, president of America’s Council on Foreign Relations, and once the US envoy to Northern Ireland states, “what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East”.
IT was a scene straight out of some disaster movie. Last month I was taking an internal flight in India, leaving at 9pm.
TWO minutes after the BBC’s exit poll was announced last Thursday night, Iain Dale, the Conservative commentator, blogged: “Don’t panic chaps and chapesses.
COULD Northern Ireland decide the course of British politics tomorrow, after all?
HAVE the Brits finally become European, a discussion paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank asked last week?
GIVEN any thought to what you’ll be eating for dinner tonight?
AMERICANS — don’t you just love them? Actually, by and large, I do. There’s an ugly snootiness in some quarters in Ireland, and Europe more broadly, towards the US and its citizens which was never quite going to be eradicated by the election of Barack Obama. I have written as much before.
ARE you ready for Lisbon III?
THERE is nothing remotely amusing about suicide, but one story on the topic at the weekend struck me as a bit funny. According to the Sunday Independent, “29 deaths by suicide can be directly linked to the turmoil in the construction and property sector ...”
THEY might not quite constitute a “new Republic”, but Fine Gael’s proposals for constitutional reform, to be launched by Enda Kenny today, deserve to be debated seriously.
IT’S the word of the century so far. Just when the search engine launched back in 1998 became a verb — “to google” — no one quite knows, but many of us google something, anything, dozens of times a day.
I WAS in Dubai at the weekend. Nice enough place if you like that kind of thing: glitzy, a bit soulless, but after the weather we’ve been having at home, who’s complaining?
THE space shuttle Endeavour touched down in Florida early on Monday morning after a successful two-week mission to the international space station.
BRITAIN, it seems, is drowning in a vale of tears. One after another, in the run-up to their general election, British politicians are lining up to emote in public. Never before have so many cried so easily, so openly and so often.
WITH perhaps 50,000 Muslims now living in Ireland, it’s imperative we find a modus vivendi. No one pretends it’s going to be easy but there is no alternative to trying.
IT’S 125 years old this year and if some reports are to be believed, the Orange Card is still the one the British Tories feel should be played. It was Sir Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who coined the phrase in the aftermath of the 1885 election and it continues to have a chilly resonance for nationalists.
WHO will ever forget January 20, 2009? In America and around the world, it was truly a great day. It shouldn’t have mattered but for someone of colour to assume leadership of what we used to call the “free world” counted for quite a lot.
THE news from Haiti is always terrible. No Haitian news doesn’t mean good Haitian news, merely that the long, slow Haitian catastrophe is continuing as usual.
ARE those Northerners sick, you might well ask? Their vital political institutions might be on the brink of collapse and what are they doing? Laughing their heads off, that’s what.
HE WAS only little – about two, I would say – and a bit scruffy, his feet barely touching the floor as he was dragged along the Tesco aisle by his mother who was carrying a shopping basket and also pushing a buggy containing a younger brother or sister. She let him go for a minute, distracted by the choice of soft drinks, and he sat down and started to pull plastic bottles of mineral water off the lowest shelf.
I LIKE to think I’m not old enough to play golf but my youngest brother has been fascinated and obsessed with it from an early age, so that excuse won’t wash.
TOMORROW and on Friday we will brave the busiest travelling days of the year to be with our families, or they come to us depending on whose turn it is to host. It’s as if the whole country stands up in a mass game of musical chairs, everyone scrambling to land somewhere, somehow at a table with a turkey and a plum pudding.
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