If the Government wants to abolish oaths, it should. Replacing it with a meaningless statement of truth is pointless, writes John McGuirk Finally. Witnesses will no longer be required to swear before God or make an affirmation when filing affidavits under new proposals agreed by the Cabinet. Instead they will be able to make what…
With some honourable exceptions, we don’t have journalists in Ireland, we have cheerleaders, writes John McGuirk “Excellent investigative Journalism in the Sunday Times”, tweeted Irish Independent columnist Colette Browne on Sunday morning, in response to the extensive report the London-based paper had just published laying out the multiple alleged failures of Boris Johnson’s…
The virus has demonstrated that we still have the national capacity to come together and unite against a common threat, writes John McGuirk This column is usually about criticising politicians and identifying all the things wrong with the country. No doubt, it will be just that again in the future, but it’s been very…
On Sunday, I had the rare privilege of being denounced in the opinion pages of no less an organ of official Irish conventional wisdom than the Sunday Times. “Politics,” announced Justine McCarthy, “needs more Kate O’Connell’s to defend us from the John McGuirk’s”. Last week, by happy coincidence, I celebrated my 36th birthday. That is, it turns…
In government, Sinn Féin will disappoint and entrench the growing divide between many of our people and the political class, writes John McGuirk In a country unused to earthquakes, even the mildest tremor in the ground might feel like the end of the world. When Mount Vesuvius erupted and swept through the Roman town of…
In Irish politics the main parties agree on almost everything, writes John McGuirk Speaking to the Sunday Times at the weekend, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar declared that the election campaign which is now underway would be “a once in a generation moment”, and “as important for the country as the campaigns of 1977, and 1997”.…
The spectacle of a senior politician only noticing the crisis in hospitals because her own child got sick is hard to stomach, writes John McGuirk The old American adage that there are only two things certain in life: death, and taxes, is only partially true. There is, of course, another certainty, and that is that…
Lorraine Clifford-Lee survived because she is a liberal woman in a party that is very short of liberal women, writes John McGuirk There are very few politicians in the Oireachtas with a more conventionally liberal voting record than Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee. If you can think of a hot button issue over the past six or…
We should save money and just let Micheál Martin vote 44 times on each Dáil vote, writes John McGuirk Watching the House of Commons in recent weeks, at the height of Brexitmania, probably the most unfamiliar part of it to those of us who observe Irish politics was the way in which the result…
Facebook and Twitter can’t make hate go away, and we shouldn’t ask them to, writes John McGuirk “Hatred,” The Sunday Business Post declared this week, “is still having its say”. The paper’s eye-catching headline referred to a story by its reporter, Aaron Rogan, that Facebook and Twitter were still, as he put it, failing to…