'It would be disastrous to recreate the conditions that preceded this,' he tells Fintan O'Toole

Instead of using North for proxy wars, Britain and EU need to get back to living with ambiguity

Donald Trump boasted of not having started a war. But he did: a war on nature

If a government moves classes online, it is its duty to ensure every student can access digital learning

In the fight against Covid, the wisdom of the crowd has been proven right

There’s a script for what works, so Ireland should stop improvising

Dublin’s inner city could soon become a ghost town – or reoccupied as a living public space

Openness is so fundamental to us that we have failed to shut off the island from danger

It’s no Gettysburg Address, but the inaugural speech walked the line between honesty and optimism

There was no ‘society’ separate from the church’s power to inflict damnation

Brexit could help Scotland’s first minister over some of the obstacles to independence

If Trump is not impeached and prosecuted for subversion he still has good chance of winning

The State has issued a vast IOU drawn on the bank of public trust

This was not a rush of blood to the head. It is the logic of a post-democratic Republican Party

Public losing faith in empty promises that pain will be matched by gain

The pandemic usurped the artist in 2020. But live performance has long proved resilient

Dilemma of continental influence that led Britain to join EU returns as it leaves

2020 in review: Donald Trump will continue to unleash racism, nativism and a fear of government

It seems that the virus is playing a cruel game with our efforts to do the right thing

Don’t gloat at Britain, the once-powerful free country that has made itself weak

Two-thirds of Irish children are not read to at home. This is not progress

British premier can concede to the EU or foist pain on the most vulnerable

Brexit talks dragged on because Johnson’s regime has been playing its own game

The British, loyalists and Sinn Féin each have their reasons for distorted storytelling

Trans people’s enemy is patriarchy, not feminism

Vaccine suspicion has a long-standing imaginative power that’s hard to overcome

In a fast world, our slow government gradually digests issues it swallowed years ago

The crises of 2016 posed huge difficulties for Ireland but have left us in a better place

Collapse of Vote Leave gang not timely enough to save Brexit-addled Britain

Haunted by intimate and public grief, he is the most Gothic figure in US politics

US president-elect is a second coming of the lost moment of the Kennedys

Trump is not going anywhere, and Biden cannot proceed as if democracy is saved

Trumpism is alive and kicking – and openly contemptuous of democracy

The president’s success in forcing himself into our thoughts will be his downfall

What is at stake when the US votes on Tuesday? Almost everything

Passing a law on house parties that clearly cannot be enforced erodes public authority

The same cannot be said for the 220,000 Americans the virus has killed so far

Martin Parr’s work portrays socio-cultural shift from conformism

We are bumbling along with ad hoc arrangements created in a panic last March

President who promised to bring back coal oversaw its steepest ever decline

Covid pandemic is amplifying divisions inherent in having two different economies

If Aids was Trump’s Vietnam, Covid-19 is his director’s cut of Apocalypse Now

Covid-19 reveals the great weakness of authoritarianism: the leader’s body

Trump’s biggest political achievement is his alliance with Catholic America

In the end, if we cannot choose to die, we cannot choose to live

Current scenario heightens our perceptions and new artists will emerge from it

Lack of mandatory sick pay means people have no choice but to go to work when they feel ill and this helps coronavirus spread

But the reality is that the Brexit fantasists have failed. Only the disruptors are still standing

Because the Brexiteers cannot articulate the force that drives them, they cannot set its boundaries

Six months ago, schools and colleges closed. What have we learned since?

‘Oven-ready’ policy tactic had secret addendum – ‘we’ll go back and edit the cookbook’

There are worrying signs that those managing the pandemic are losing the ability to concentrate on what matters

The firm early decisions, the mis-steps, the reopenings as the country grappled with Covid-19

Lack of testing and adequate tracing stand in stark contrast to situation in Copenhagen

What is truly beyond comprehension is that they did not even think politically

We must not allow controversy destroy social capital that has kept us going

The obvious threat of meat plants becoming vectors of Covid-19 infection was not met with robust action

In throwing out State’s Climate Mitigation Plan, judges have done a real service to Irish democracy

Why are problems entirely predictable in April only being addressed now?

The epic story of liberation has become mesmerisingly tedious

Cancel culture isn’t new, just a new term for an old concept of cynical hypocrisy

With just five weeks to go, the Department of Education has no ‘clear picture’ of what is needed

Our neighbours are still struggling to believe that Brexit is a real-world event

The two countries’ hybrid urban culture was a truth universally unacknowledged

The unfinished business of slavery, emancipation and Civil War is still playing itself out

In 1999 the then minister for education made brave choices. Does he still have it in him?

If Donald Trump is not removed from office, Abraham Lincoln’s republic cannot endure

The task it faces is, in its scale, something like the nation-building of a century ago

For once, we didn’t follow Britain – a moment of great psychological significance

It is the Greens’ own values that force them to take the power that is on offer

Fatherhood is a kind of makey-up thing, but it has come into its own in lockdown

There will be no justice for victims and the bereaved. But we can at least have the truth

Covid-19 has turned the tide against right-wing nationalism and ‘strongman’ leaders

If how we treat Travellers is our model for ‘rooting out’ racism, the prospects look bleak

In 2016, white America elected a racist president. That privilege comes with a cost

Covid-19 has destroyed live performance, we must support artists in reinventing it

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it impossible for the old health system to continue

Sensible coronavirus advice prompts wild overreaction among establishment elites

The attitudes behind Brexit resurface in Boris Johnson’s tragic failure of leadership

Ireland will have to borrow a lot of money. What matters is how well we spend it

How can Scotland meet climate targets while Ireland fails? One word: leadership

Spit at someone and you go jail. Spread deadly lies and you enjoy impunity

He is a truly global celebrity but we might like him more if he did not try to be so good

Mistakes are inevitable in this crisis. What matters is learning from them

A repeat of the last crash, with ordinary people bled dry, would be catastrophic

Government adopted system for handling emergencies in 2017 but has ignored it

The world has loved, hated and envied the US. Now, for the first time, we pity it

Post-coronavirus era will demand a radicalism the old parties are not trained for

The new government will have to dispel the despair that lingers from the last decade

It is not too late but the Government must act now to save care workers

Johnson’s first response was at odds with rest of world but virus does not respect his delusions of national character

Technology has made this plague different from anything humanity has known before

Immense task of reconstruction will demand much more than frantic improvisation

The coronavirus crisis reminds us we must find a way not to kill the host we inhabit

A poetic genius who marvellously mapped the Burren, Connemara and Aran Islands

Covid-19 is cruelly capricious but human beings need to attach significance to suffering

The coronavirus pandemic exposes that those who keep us alive are deeply undervalued

There is no such thing as mass death – people die one by one and each is unique

It should not take something as terrible as this to awake us to life’s inherent fragility

Who needs a politics of disruption when Covid-19 is disrupting the world?