The role of the President of Ireland is supposed to be gloriously vague. Catherine Connolly should cut ribbons, plant trees and release bland statements that offend nobody. The whole point of the office is that it hovers serenely above the daily madness of Irish political life like a constitutional swan. Which is precisely why it…
The Taoiseach Micheál Martin was asked a simple question this week by reporter Ben Scallon: “Do you believe that a child can be transgender?” He answered definitively, with the confidence of a man who knew the party line: “Yes, I do believe.” He then went on to pontificate: “There are young people in life who’ve…
Detransitioners are people who once believed in the promise of medical transition and later came to regret those interventions and attempt to reverse course. For most of us, the idea of medical transition is strange, even unsettling. But for someone who is deeply unhappy in their body, or in their life, it can become a…
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is the official State body responsible for collecting and publishing statistics about the country. The CSO must count things carefully as it runs the census, produces data on population, employment, health, crime, education and the economy, sets standards for how data is defined and collected, and supplies the data used…
Intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.” When George Orwell wrote these words in his proposed preface to Animal Farm, he was not describing prison or state censorship. He was describing a far more personal failure – the moment when a journalist knows the truth and decides, for reasons…
In recent years, schools, the media, and other institutions in Ireland have come to accept a set of transgender-related claims as the new normal. This shift was not the result of careful argument or evidence, but of sustained lobbying. Teachers and principals accepted this newly sanctioned view largely because journalists amplified it without interrogation. Those…
There has been remarkably little serious discussion about how Irish schools are supposed to respond to the sudden rise in children identifying as transgender. This is not something teachers were trained for, and it is not an area in which teachers’ unions or school management bodies have any real expertise. Yet schools have been left…