No one in their right mind would be interested in the squalid personnel-changes that pass for politics in Poland but the elevation of Zyta Gilowska to minister of finance and deputy prime minister illustrates a few realities about where power lies in Poland that might go some way to reassure those who are worried about […]
“They queue at the check-in desks in near silence, the weather-beaten, mountainy men in their cleanest dirty clothes with the tell-tale spatters of plaster; the sprinkling of women of a certain age, with the sprayed-rigid hair-dos in unlikely colours…” So begins a model of sloppy reporting and editing entitled “A Polish homecoming” in the Irish […]
The Christmas edition of Polish current affairs magazine Polityka contains a fairly typical look back on the year in photographs. Internationally, the year is sombre to say the least: New Orleans, the London bomb attacks, race riots in Sydney, the earthquake in Kashmir, violence in Iraq… There is no room for levity in the captions. […]
Some of you decadent westerners, festering as you are in your godless moral decay, may have been labouring under the misapprehension that Our Lord Jesus Christ the Almighty Saviour was born into a humble family — in a stable, in fact. Here in holy, marian Poland we know better. As cribs are erected around the […]
News comes to me of an article in the Irish Times (Dec 8th) about the plight of Poles in Ireland. It seems that many of the estimated 120,000 emigrants have been lured there by unrealistically optimistic stories about Ireland in the Polish media. (These stories started before Poland’s referendum on joining the EU, when Ireland […]
The view from Gdańsk is not pretty. As Pinter accepts his Nobel prize, Poland slips further into the absurd and the vulgar. Here is a random selection, from memory, so apologies for any small inaccuracies: Charges of defamation against a journalist were, after lengthy consideration and great tax-payer funded expense, finally dropped. The charges were […]
