New Dublin transport strategy a sick joke
The publication of the Greater Dublin Transport Strategy 2022-2042 in draft form for public consultation is, I am afraid, a sick joke on the people of the greater Dublin metropolitan area. It consists of 160 pages of waffle, aspiration, euphemisms, evasions, bullet-point wish-lists, and vague blather about urban planning, transport values and all sorts of […]
Bedsit ban offers a warning on future income supports
The Pandemic Unemployment Payment (“PUP”) was a wholly necessary and socially just intervention by the State to help the most economically vulnerable survive the calamitous effects of the lockdowns. Some may argue that it was unfair at the edges, insofar as deserving cases between jobs and other similar exclusions were harsh. Others claimed that PUPs […]
Sinn Féin needs reality check on historic prosecutions from Troubles
The killing in 1974 of John Patrick Cunningham, a 27 year old man with the mental age of a child and an ingrained fear of British army patrols, was utterly wrong and indefensible. Even if one allows for the fact that he may have aroused suspicion and was running away from his killers, there was […]
Green policies are increasingly divorced from reality
Eamon Ryan chose this week to make two eye-catching pronouncements. He first hinted that he was contemplating a change in the Government’s renewable energy target (currently 70% by 2030) to 80% by 2030. We weren’t told whether this had been agreed between the parties in the coalition. Then he indicated that he was considering creating […]
Is there room for another political party?
There is a very different tone to RTE’s advertising these days. Apart from exhortations to buy a TV licence “brought to you from the Government of Ireland”, there is a plethora of state or semi-state advertising covering a vast spectrum of campaigns from “Your Mental Health” and sexual harrassment to winter windscreen wiper maintenance, from […]
NDP is a smokescreen for political incoherence
The Government’s published national development plan is, in reality, a smokescreen for complete incoherence in their different parties’ approaches to many hugely important issues. The idea that various component parts of the so-called plan will have to compete among themselves to attract Government approval, prioritisation and financing is, frankly speaking, a joke. So too is […]