Stalled in a traffic jam snaking up one of the M50’s off-ramps this morning–only in Ireland do road planners think motorways and roundabouts mix–I caught the tail-end of RTE’s Morning Ireland. It featured a report on the canonisation of the 19th-century priest Fr. Charles of Mt. Argus, due to take place this weekend in Rome*. […]
With hindsight, I suppose it was inevitable that the ruling establishment in Poland turn its guns on the teletubbies. Inevitable, too, that I would at least mention it, even though Beatroot already has too. The Spokesperson for Children’s Rights, Ewa Sowińska, thinks one or all of them is propogating homosexuality. She thinks they should be […]
The champagne’s being put back into cold storage. Just like all those voting machines. Martin Cullen is now back in. It’s beginning to feel like a bad zombie film…
In my constituency, Conor “Kebabs” Lenihan has just got in on the first count.
To quote Dick Tuck, who spoke on the occassion of losing the race for a California Senate Seat, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”
We all make mistakes. Lord knows, I do (having noticed this morning that I spelt the surname of the man who I sort-of-hope will be the next Taoiseach as “Kenney”!). But in this “knowledge economy” there’s now money to be made, and lots of it, from slips at the keyboard. Take the rather noisome figure […]
With the media moratorium on election coverage due to fall like a sheet over a disfigured corpse, it is time to reflect, even if it sets your teeth on edge, on the campaigns that are rapidly winding down. Alas, it was far from an electrifying spectacle. If the politics of ideology is a thing of […]
The American author Richard Ford is scheduled to give a reading at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre on June 6. I’m currently immersed in his latest novel, The Lay of the Land, a real baggy monster whose narrative leisurely meanders, with plenty of oxbow digressions, through the fertile mind of Frank Bascombe, the realtor familiar to readers […]
It’s been reported that J.K. Rowling has now pledged a “staggering” sum to the reward for the safe return of Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old English girl who was abducted in Portugal 12 days ago.This sum is in addition to the $3 million already raised, in part due to contributions from such notoriously media-shy figures as […]
I don’t have the heart to explain all the “lustration” shenanigans in Poland so I will just throw out a few comments for those who have been following it, but perhaps not that closely, and perhaps relying on English language sources. Unsurprisingly, the lustration law was found to be largely unconstitutional on Friday by the […]
