This is the transcript supplied to political correspondents by TV3 from last night’s interview with the Irish Labour Party leader on The Political Party, now broadcast on Friday nights at 11 pm. Ursula Halligan is a very good interviewer and so is RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke who also recently tried to pin Eamon Gilmore down on this issue of coalition with Fianna Fáil. (more…)
Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day and The Irish Times has an interesting feature by Fionola Meredith on Donegal-born Mark Boyle who is planning to live without spending one red cent for an entire year (To read the piece click here) (more…)
Check out last night’s Vincent Browne news and current affairs programme on TV3 by clicking here and you will see a lively discussion on Mary Harney’s free hairdo (“standard wash and blow-dries”) from training and employment agency Fás.
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Herewith a letter in today’s Irish Times. It restates the classic liberal position, which I would agree with in principle. But as someone who works in the city centre every day – and has done so since the late 1970s – I have to observe that there is something new taking place on the “begging front”. (more…)
There’s nothing like a dose of reality to test your liberal credentials. I believe in the maximum amount of freedom for everyone to do as they wish, as long as it’s compatible with public order in the broadest sense and the welfare of society in general. (more…)
I’m writing this in my hotel-room in Wexford at the end of the Fine Gael national conference which I have been attending in my capacity as Political Correspondent with The Irish Times. It’s not a normal annual conference or ardfheis because there are no motions or elections of party officers and in fact the whole thing is quite minutely stage-managed. (more…)
These are tough times and the recession has even begun to bite at my own newspaper with a plan announced yesterday for up to 60 redundancies. But amid the gloom there are still some glorious moments that make life worth living. The Munster rugby team’s barnstorming display against the New Zealand All Blacks in Limerick this week was one. The election of a black man as President of the world’s most powerful country is another. (more…)
Mamma mia, here we go again, another Lisbon referendum, if the heavy hints being dropped by Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin are anything to go by. He said on RTE last night a decision on the issue would be made in advance of the next EU summit in Brussels on 11 and 12 December. (more…)
Politics can be a fickle business. After his innovative and decisive action in apparently preventing a partial collapse of the banking system, Brian Cowen’s popularity soared. If an opinion poll had been held at that point in time, his ratings would in all likelihood have been astronomical. (more…)
The Abbey got its timing right with its new production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht. It’s a parable based on the rise of Hitler at a time of economic depression and the last line is a warning that something similar could happen again. (more…)
Before they are washed away by the receding tide of political history, a few points need to be made about the Progressive Democrats. Joe Higgins described them as an “utterly malign influence” on Vincent Browne’s late-night TV3 programme but that’s too dismissive – they were not all bad, or all good. (more…)
Watch this and cringe! Hard news reporter from the Birmingham Mail goes to the States to work for the Obama campaign in Miami. . Interviewed by a reporter from Dutch TV (journalists always end up getting stitched by other journalists) he reveals a little too much information. (more…)
“From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
