Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all, he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. It was thoughtless of […]
It may be a decent summer, after all, for the tourist industry in rural and coastal Ireland. But summer in the city is going to be pretty quiet. That’s the verdict of Fáilte Ireland, which gave a briefing last week on its projections for the season. “It’s going to be a bit of a year […]
“Eamon Ryan is a nice man, but he is ineffective,” Michael O’Leary declared in a radio interview. And that was one of the Ryanair chief’s kinder comments about the transport minister. Mr Ryan needed to “get the finger out”, he said, because he was “without doubt one of the worst ministers for transport ever”. Mr […]
So what Covid restriction will you be most happy to abandon? Masks, many people will say. And I guess that if I had to wear one all day, while working in a surgery or school, I might agree. But popping on a mask before going into a shop or onto a train is not a […]
The language of housing is built on class division. If homes are close together and fronted by streets you have a ‘working class ghetto’. Space them out a bit, plant a few trees, and it becomes a ‘desirable suburban development’. It could just as accurately be called a middle-class ghetto. But that won’t happen. The […]
Of the many changes Ireland has seen in recent years, none has been more dramatic than the collapse of organised religion. It is in decline all over the western world, but the retreat, which has taken the best part of a century in, say, Britain and France, has been condensed into a few decades here. […]
KBC bank is pushing ahead with its plan to leave the Irish market and the few banks left continue to cut back on branch offices and cash points. The wheel is turning. Over the past 50 years, banks achieved such a firm grip on society that many people thought it would be impossible to live […]
The GAA prides itself on running amateur sports but everybody knows that many counties, and some clubs, make payments to managers and coaches. Players don’t get paid a wage but they get expenses and perks such as holidays and trips abroad for training. At some stage in most seasons an argument will be advanced that […]
In the old Eddie Cochran song, Summertime Blues, a frustrated teenager seeks political help to beat his boredom problems. Well I called my congressman And he said, quote: ‘I’d like to help you son, But you’re too young to vote’ That won’t be the case much longer if Senator Malcolm Byrne has his way. The […]
I was eight years old when the Suez Canal last made international headlines. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalised the canal which was being run, at a handsome profit, by British and French enterprises, successors of the companies that had financed its construction a century earlier. The British and French governments detested Nasser. They […]