We have enough Sad Irish Girl Wanders Around Dublin novels
In fact, we have too many books altogether. Two hundred thousand books are published annually in the UK alone
Michael D Higgins’s grandiose statements about military spending won’t raise Ireland’s stock
The universe where Ireland can bask in our peacenik status is gone
Why do so many Irish men look Australian? Ireland is under a sort of reverse colonisation
The unholy mullet-moustache diptych is a sign that the emigrant experience works both ways
Apolitical Oscars a chilling sign of the times
Apolitical Oscars indicative of sense that world is sinking into total fatalistic malaise
Timothée Chalamet’s overt pursuit of greatness is a refreshing break from faux ‘who me?’ humility
Chalamet’s speech is a tonic to the jaded insouciance, the fear of being seen as a ‘try hard’, that has taken over
Debates over Rishi Sunak’s Englishness or Leo Varadkar’s Irishness are deranged
It’s rightly treated with the same disdain - not because it's too provocative, but because it's too weird
Kanye West has taken vice-signalling to a new level of brutishness. Can he come back?
The pendulum will probably find a position of equilibrium between the priggish extravagances of the 2010s and the nastiness of the current moment
This is a good time to recognise all that Salman Rushdie sacrificed for free speech
The conflict between the right to individual speech versus the need to accommodate the sensibilities of so-called marginalised groups became a perennial theme of the 2010s
I am tired of explaining Michael D Higgins’s words to incredulous English people
Criticism in the UK that should be limited to the President is spilling over as some go on the offensive, making sweeping generalisations about Ireland’s entire national character
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is right - it’s time to celebrate ‘masculine energy’ again
A society that enjoyed the denigration of men was always going to face a reckoning
Could religion be the antidote to declining birth rates, celebrity worship and political polarisation?
This new religiosity is a backlash to the the hyper-secularisation that Britain and the US went through. But don’t expect it to take off in Ireland just yet
Ireland cannot rely on a soft and woolly international reputation anymore
Greatest task facing the new government is restoring Ireland’s standing in Europe and the world
The worst of this strange decade of wokeness is over
Measures designed to change material realities matter more than sociocultural pieties
Restoration of Notre Dame shows hard things can be achieved if we’re not afraid to be ambitious
We must stop mistaking a lack of ambition in planning and building for caution and rule-following
To the French, Germans and even the Brits, Ireland is blessed with boring politics
Amid criticism of Ireland’s domestic politics making it hard for new ideas to break through, there’s something to be said for ‘same old, same old’