Perhaps the strongest argument for legalising – or at least decriminalising – cannabis (and other recreational drugs) is that this measure takes it out of the hands of criminal drug-dealers. If people are going to smoke weed anyway, let it be through a legal route – just as cigarettes remain legal, even if unhealthy. And…
Piers Paul Read is one of Britain’s most distinguished novelists and writers – author of such best-sellers as Alive (the story of the Andes survivors), The Templars, and 17 novels in all, including A Married Man, Monk Dawson, and The Free Frenchman – the last being a riveting account of a French family during the…
The Irish pub has been a feature of our landscape and society for many a long year. ‘The Brazen Head’ in Dublin’s Merchant’s Quay dates from the year 1198 AD
The proposed project of a National Women’s Museum – announced recently by Culture Minister Catherine Martin – is admirable, in my view.
We have heard much, in recent times, about ‘far-right’ and ‘far-left’ tendencies in politics; but are these terms really meaningful in the modern age? As everyone knows, they originate from the time of the 1789 French Revolution when deputies supporting the monarchy and the ancien régime sat on the right of the National Assembly, and…
When former president Mary McAleese was asked – on The Late Late Show – about the prospects for a united Ireland, she was judicious in her reply: she would stick by the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulated that it must happen by democratic consent. But, she added, the demographics “were going in the right direction”.…
I wrote, last week, about the reason why there’s a ‘culture gap’ between younger people, and the more mature generations – especially on issues like ‘gender wars’. Younger people often have a literal attitude to equality: everyone must be equal, and natural, or biological, differences, don’t come into the equation. There is also an interesting…
A philosophy professor at the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alex Byrne, had his most recent book cancelled by the prestigious Oxford University Press.
The renowned American author Henry James gave advice to anyone seeking to write a novel or a play. There are three rules, he said: “Dramatise, dramatise, dramatise!” That is, make everything in fiction more extreme than in real life. Make the baddies badder and the goodies more heroic. Exaggerate every aspect of story and action.…
Every August, when the Rose of Tralee festival comes around, there’s a breakout of demands calling for it to be brought to an end – on grounds that it’s outdated, sexist, judgmental of women and all the rest. I may even have voiced such an opinion myself back in the dim dark past. But in…