We have certainly seen, in recent years, the onward march of the cashless society. First, there were credit cards, which began to make their appearance in the latter half of the 20th century. Subsequently, there were bank debit cards, which allowed us to pay for an item via ‘chip and pin’. Then, in the 1990s,…
We often hear rallying calls to get more women into politics – and I’m all for supporting such encouragement. Indeed, plenty of impressive women emerged in last week’s local elections. In the context of the EU, it’s now predicted that three women are seen as the ‘queens of Europe’ – and likely to dominate the…
O’Connell Street is surely Ireland’s best-known thoroughfare, named after ‘The Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell just a hundred years ago, in 1924. How interesting to learn, from Christine Casey’s peerless architectural survey of Dublin, that the city Corporation had voted to change the name of Sackville Street 40 years previously, in 1884, but the local residents objected.…
Around the beginning of this century, I worked on London newspaper alongside a lively and admirable writer, Andrew Pierce. I came to know that Andrew was adopted, and just recently he has published an account of his search for his birth mother, ‘Finding Margaret’. Margaret’s story was not an unusual one. She was a nurse…
Tony O’Reilly, who died at the weekend, did a lot for Ireland, quite beyond inventing the “Kerrygold” butter brand, although that is a noteworthy success. It was also about rebranding Ireland itself, as a country where people could thrive. In his unstinting work for the Ireland Funds, he advanced the Peace Process and worked consistently to…
When I was a teenager – maybe about 16 – a friend and I decided to follow a fad of “decadence”. We weren’t all that sure what “decadence” was, but we knew it had little to do with normal life in our then cosy village of Sandymount in Dublin. But teenagers soon find out about…
There is a contradiction at the heart of much Catholic discourse over the future of the Church – and faith. Or so it seems to me. The experience of synodality indicates that we must face a future in which there is more involvement by the laity, and less “clericalism”. There is much criticism of times…
The pro-Palestinian disturbances on American – and other campuses – have been widely compared to the youthful demonstrations which helped to bring an end to the Vietnam war in the 1960s. Certainly, the protests against the American involvement in the Vietnam war were momentous (Australia and other allies also took part). Two Irish-American Catholic priests,…
What is ‘the far right’ in the political – or social – sphere? We hear this phrase from various authorities, but when the admirable Senator Sharon Keogan asked Justice Minister Helen McEntee for a definition, the minister dithered over her response. She was “not sure there is a definition,” said Ms McEntee. It was, she…
It won’t be surprise to learn that Ireland is growing richer, and there are, in the words of a leading accountant, “an awful lot of people making money” in Ireland today. The number of ‘super-rich’ individuals – those with over €20 million in their possession – has increased by 200 over the past two years,…