Articles in the Comment Category

“…it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, or his team of speech-writers and communications advisors, surely had the famous opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities as a touchstone when framing the landmark address the country’s leader delivered to the nation on the evening of St Patrick’s Day in relation to the Covid- 19 public health emergency. There was more than an echo of Dickens’ “It was ...

Significant public health events such as the current worldwide efforts to protect people from the Coronavirus almost inevitably spread a complementary infection in their wake, no matter how carefully they are managed. Fear and insecurity can easily invade the minds of individuals and communities, particularly, as has become the case in Ireland over the past week, precautions against the spread of Covid-19 begin to intrude upon one’s daily routine and events such as the annual St Patrick’s Day Parades get cancelled. As people’s living patterns, plans and habits get disrupted, ...

CORONAVIRUS NEEDS PRUDENT BUT PROPORTIONATE RESPONSE Every period of human history can be seen as having some predominant unease circulating in the collective consciousness of society. The nature of the unease changes with time, place and historical period but nearly always it is a manifestation of the primal fears hotwired into the human condition and which the author of the Book of Revelation chose to embody in the dread personages of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and their assigned cargo of war, famine, death and pestilence. The last of ...

Aficionados of speculative fiction of a certain vintage will undoubtedly recall with affection the first series of the American television fantasy drama Heroes, and will be familiar with one of its catchphrase lines: “Save the cheerleader, save the world!” It’s a slogan that offers irresistible adaption to the plight of the humble bumblebee, and the vital importance to the plant’s ecosystem of halting the reduction in numbers of this and other pollinator insect species in order to avoid a catastrophic imbalancing of the complex weave of nature that preserves the ...

Somewhere in the aftermath of a General Election, someone always says it, either with the weary voice of the defeated or with the nightingale thrill that fills the throat of the victorious: “The people have spoken.” The electorate who have significantly changed the established landscape of Irish representative politics by their casting of ballots on Saturday last to determine the composition of the 33rd Dáil have certainly had their say. But what exactly is it they are saying, and how likely is it that their wishes and aspirations for how ...

The development buzz which has been animating the economic landscape of Co Monaghan over the past couple of years shows no sign of lowering its triumphant pitch. Monday’s signal occasion for Carrickmacross that marked the formal opening ceremony for the extension of the Chinese Newbaze group of its manufacturing operations into Ireland was another signpost on the ascendant route that economic development in important sectors has been following. Particular significance attaches to this good news story given the severe blow delivered to South Monaghan when the Bose plant went out of ...

While the promise of a momentous breakthrough that would deliver some feel of finality to the long-running Brexit saga that hung in the air as we went to press last week was circumscribed somewhat by subsequent events at Westminster, there is, as the cloister bells of deadline sound in our ears again this week, a prevailing sense that some of the sound and the fury has been extracted from the issue and that it is progressing towards a conclusion that holds some realistic prospect of the doomsday no-deal scenario being ...

The coming to an end this week of the long wait by the picturesque and pristine North Monaghan village of Glaslough to replicate the national Tidy Towns success they enjoyed in 1978 has precipitated great pride and jubilation in Co Monaghan. The 41 years since Glaslough’s fabled first triumph in the national contest and their second have wrought enormous change in both the physical and social landscape of Ireland. Back in the 1970s, the Tidy Towns event fostered best practice in an admirable but relatively narrow field of environmental endeavour, handing ...

Boris and Donald, where would we in the media be without them? Open a newspaper or tune in to a broadcast or social media news platform this week and there the two lads were again, deflecting the very worst of headlines with astounding savoir faire. There once was a time when a British Prime Minister found by the highest court in the land to have acted outside the law would have been facing not merely the extinguishment of his political career but processes that would have at their end the severest ...

There is much talk in these Brexit-afflicted days about a United Ireland. Those doing the talking are not just those, like Sinn Féin, who have always been canvassing the reunification of the country as a deeply rooted tenet of political ideology. The conversation has become quite a commonplace one in Ireland as Brexit has made manifest the problems and complications arising from the existence of two separate countries on our small island and what would happen if the invisible border between them suddenly became a much more tangible thing, an impediment ...