We’ll publish several novels (or one Ulysses) worth of words on irishtimes.com this weekend, but there are two in particular that stayed with me after I read them the other day. They appear in Conor Lally’s riveting account of the evidence at the sentencing hearing of Sean McGovern, a senior figure in the Kinahan crime gang. McGovern, a 40-year-old Dubliner, has pleaded guilty to two charges of directing an organised crime gang as part of the Kinahan-Hutch feud. He directed the cartel’s plans to kill two people, Noel Kirwan and James “Mago” Gately.
The Special Criminal Court heard of private messages – or what the cartel presumed were private, until gardaí decrypted them – between gang members and an Estonian hitman, Imre Arakas, who was flown to Dublin to kill Gately.
In one of these messages, Arakas, a former wrestler, writes the following: “It seems possible to take him down when he comes out of the car then on the way to the front door. The problem is there is nowhere to hide.
“A silencer would be good and it would be very good if the ‘dog’ [gun] is accurate. It could be just one shot to the head from distance. It’s possible I will see what I can do. Best regards.”
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Best regards. It’s an unsettling juxtaposition: a matter-of-fact exchange about the mechanics of murder, finished off with that corporate-patter sign-off. You should read the piece.
Elsewhere on the site this weekend, Pat Leahy sets the scene for two impending byelections, in Dublin Central and Galway West, by identifying seven things to look out for.
As Leahy reminds us, byelection results can reverberate widely. “They pushed Jack Lynch over the edge in 1979, contributing to his decision to resign as Fianna Fáil leader and plonking Charles Haughey into the Office of An Taoiseach.
“In 1994, byelections changed the Dáil arithmetic sufficiently to prompt Labour to seek and achieve a change in government, swapping Fine Gael for Fianna Fáil. Paul Murphy’s victory in Dublin South West in 2014 turned out to be the death-knell for water charges.”
When the State opened its doors to Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s all-out invasion in 2022, many of the new arrivals were housed in hotels that were, in effect, repurposed as refugee accommodation centres. This week the Government announced it would be withdrawing tourist and commercial accommodation housing from up to 16,000 Ukrainians. Ellen O’Riordan looks at the reasons for that decision and the mixed reactions to it. Where will those 16,000 people go, she asks.
Meanwhile, Kitty Holland reports that more than a thousand people in international protection centres have been told to leave by early July as they are “no longer entitled” to live there, prompting fears of a surge in demand for homelessness accommodation.
In our World section this weekend, Jack Power writes from Cyprus on the search for the remains of more than 2,000 people who were reported missing and presumed killed during the ethnic violence that tore the Mediterranean island apart in the 1960s and 70s. “Remains have been recovered from wells, fields, hillsides, riverbeds and caves, where Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots were killed by the other and hastily buried,” Power writes.
From the United States, Keith Duggan has the story of the fisherman from Maine who has become one of the Democrats’ great hopes; Naomi O’Leary has a piece on the flurry of book launches that mark the opening chapter of the French presidential election campaign; and Mark Paul explains that the whisky diplomacy of this week’s visit to the US by Britain’s King Charles cannot conceal the depth of the breach in US-UK relations.
Irish households’ gas and electricity bills will soon start to rise; that much now seems certain. PrepayPower announced a price increase on Friday and the biggest players are bound to follow. In his column, Cliff Taylor writes that this is going to present the Government with its next big test. “The Government faces the challenge of managing all this at a time when the wider political mood is fractious, its own coherence is in question and it will be distracted by the European Union presidency, which is already cutting the bandwidth of ministers and civil servants,” Taylor observes.
Elsewhere in Opinion, our new regular columnist Sinéad O’Sullivan argues that for a long time both Irish culture and tax policy were packaging a version of the country built for external consumption and validation. O’Sullivan sees in Sally Rooney, Kneecap and the comedian Vittorio Angelone a shared “generational instinct that the performance of Irishness for outside approval is finished.” She goes on: “This matters beyond culture because the posture these artists are rejecting is the same posture that has governed Irish economic strategy for a generation.”
In his column, Mark O’Connell considers how, in looking at modern warfare, technology has afforded us a new, previously unseen point of view: that of the weapons deployed to extinguish human lives. To watch footage from attack drones, he writes, “is to recognise that a new front has been opened in the degradation and dehumanisation of our culture.”
In his survey of recent studies into the effects of AI use on the brain, Ian Robertson finds some worrying conclusions. “If offloading our thinking to a machine can lead to us becoming mentally passive in other domains, this has huge implications not just for academic performance, but for our ability to live happy lives. Why? Because life throws up problems that we have to solve, but if we have lost the habit of problem-solving ourselves and instead go first to machines, then we risk harming our emotional lives too.”
Weight-loss drugs are changing individual lives in quite profound ways. But they are also reshaping society, writes Conor Pope.
I also enjoyed Laura Slattery’s interview with Kate O’Connor, the Dundalk heptathlete who won a silver medal at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo last September and has her eyes set on the Los Angeles Olympics in two years’ time. (Fans of Elizabeth Strout will enjoy Slattery’s interview with the American novelist in our culture section.)
Finally, take a look at our comprehensive guide to live music in Ireland this summer.
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