Storey funeral highlights fundamental problems with Sinn Féin
The controversy over the Provisional movement’s participation in the Bobby Storey funeral is entirely predictable. But it raises far more fundamental issues that adherence to social distancing, mask-wearing, and compliance with guidelines on funeral gatherings. Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Provisional movement, revealed itself (or unmasked itself) as the subordinate element of an […]
No optimism that coalition will last four years
The draft programme for Government for Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Green coalition is historic in at least one sense. 98 years after the National Independence Movement broke apart in a bitter, and, I think, wholly unnecessary fratricidal bloodbath on a point of high principle and little consequence, the two political descendants of that rupture are […]
Sanitising Britain’s imperialist past would require collective amnesia
Many people will find themselves somewhat emotionally torn by the sight of statues being toppled and defaced by angry, if self-appointed, modern iconoclasts. On the one hand, George Floyd’s cruel murder has started a long-delayed and hugely needed confrontation by America with the reality of its shameful anti-black political, economic, penal and social discrimination and […]
What is ‘the science’ politicians must follow?
The publication of an open letter signed by 1000 citizens, including members of our scientific and healthcare community poses a political problem for whoever is in government in the coming weeks and months. The signatories are demanding that the Government doubles down on repressing the coronavirus with a view to hunting it to extinction io the […]
We will laugh at the puritanism of the two metre advice
No-one has a crystal ball. But it might clear our heads a little to let our imaginations wander and to ask ourselves how we imagine that we will, in late May 2021, look back on the first half of 2020. Will this semester look, in retrospect, as one in which the western world over-reacted to […]
How will we proceed in a brave new post-Covid world?
While it may be trite to point out that it was far easier politically to get us into lockdown than it will be to get out of it, that does not mean that the economic, health and social damage being done by lockdown is sustainable or that ending lockdown as quickly as possible is not […]