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’
I cringed at Paul Mescal’s Brit-bashing
If Ireland wants to maintain the self-belief that it is a nation of wisecrackers and comedians then it will need to work a bit harder than this
MasterChef star Gregg Wallace’s bad behaviour was not ‘uncovered’, it was widely known
All it took was for someone to finally decide that it was time to care
The thought of Conor McGregor draped in an Irish flag on a global stage is shameful
To think of all that time we spent embarrassed by Bono’s oppressive sincerity
I could live with celebrity politicians if they were all like Jeremy Clarkson
Clarkson’s personal crusade against the British government feels very of-the-moment, symbolic of a mode of politics sweeping Europe
Ireland needs its own Joe Rogan, someone to question liberal orthodoxies
There are lessons for Ireland from the US election about the disconnect between establishment voices and the feelings of the electorate