Are we set for a repeat of the fuel protests from earlier this year? The cuts won by protestors to the excise duties we pay on fuel are due to expire shortly and if the Government begins to restore them, it is very likely that truckers and farmers will take to the streets again. The…
Last December, the American online magazine, Compact, published an article that became one of the most widely discussed of the year. The author was a would-be scriptwriter hoping for a career in the TV industry, but his career was stillborn. He was the wrong colour and the wrong sex, that is to say, he was…
Last week, something extraordinary happened at a place almost none of us had ever heard of before: 60,000 Moroccans, overwhelmingly young men, made the relatively short swim along the shoreline to somewhere called Ceuta, a small Spanish ‘exclave’ along the North African coastline. Ceuta is a small town with 84,000 inhabitants. They witnessed tens of…
There are not 800 bodies in a septic tank in the grounds of the old children’s home at Tuam. The nuns did not kill the babies or deliberately neglect them to death. In fact, the nuns ran the home about as well as they could under very difficult circumstances given the poverty of the time…
Then Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, a Catholic lawyer, it had a very specific and narrow purpose, and that was to identify and champion prisoners of conscience who were being kept behind bars for their political or other beliefs, almost always by authoritarian regimes. The danger was that these prisoners would…
America has just celebrated its 250th birthday so it seems fitting to ask whether America, in net terms, has done more harm than good, or vice versa, over those years? For the average Irish person, the question will seem ridiculous. By the average Irish person, I mean those who don’t think primarily ideologically. These ‘normies’…
Do you remember the glorious summer of 1976 when we could hardly believe our luck as the sun shone in the sky for day after day? This was back when few of us went abroad on holidays and sunny weather was something that happened in Spain, not here. Well, for that summer, we enjoyed a…
Official Ireland has its heroes and villains. The heroes and villains of the first few decades after independence in 1922 are easily categorised. The heroes are the ones who propelled Ireland forward into the modern age. They are people like Noel Browne, Sean Lemass, TK Whitaker and Gay Bryne. The villains are the ones who…
For obvious historical reasons, the vast majority of primary schools in Ireland are Catholic. The same applies to about half of secondary schools. The national school system arose out of the parochial schools. The vast majority of Irish people prior to independence in 1922 did not want to send their children to State schools because…
Pope Leo’s first encyclical was published last week. It is called Magnifica Humanitas, and the best English translation of that is probably ‘The Grandeur of Humanity’. The main topic of the encyclical is Artificial Intelligence (AI), although the lengthy document deals with a lot of other subjects as well, including, briefly, just war theory (is…