My job – on the podcast team presenting our In the News podcast - deals with topics as varied as the news and every day we try to dig a little deeper to explain the issues and the angles.
As I had nearly been knocked off my bike on Monday by a motorist driving so close she grazed me, and spent 20 minutes on Tuesday waiting for a bus that never came, I was keen to get Dublin Editor Olivia Kelly into the studio to explain just what is happening with the new transport plan for Dublin city centre and find out who thinks watering it down is a good idea.
I hope you enjoy my selection of stories from this week.
1 The second round of elections in France saw the leftist New Popular Front (NPF) win the most seats which means the country has avoided a far-right government – for now. The explainer from Europe Correspondent Jack Power, The French political system kept the far right out. Now what? is useful in understanding the chaos in France.
What I Read This Week: Chaos in France and the challenge of untangling art from the artist
What I Read This Week: ‘Brilliant writing is all about small details’
What I Read This Week: Shauna Bowers - Miriam Lord articulates what every woman in Ireland was thinking
What I Read This Week: Nadine O’Regan on Paul Mescal’s ‘lewk’ and the thoughts of Gabor Maté
2 Now that it is possible to watch or hear an entire news bulletin without a mention of Ukraine it is all too easy to put the deadly conflict to the back of your mind – until news of yet another atrocity breaks through. This week the Russian missile strike on the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv shocked the world. Daniel McLaughlin, who has been reporting for the Irish Times from Ukraine since the war began, wrote about it: Kyiv hospital missile strike: ‘I saw one of the doctors lying there, dead.
3 A good news climate story? Yes, really. On Tuesday, Kevin O’Sullivan reported the going-in-the-right direction news that Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 6.8 per cent last year, the lowest overall level in 30 years. We are well off track to meet our 2030 climate goals but this encouraging read shows we are not powerless to make change.
4 Gladiator II won’t hit the cinemas until November but it’s such a big deal – massive budget, bulked-up local boy – that Donald Clarke reviewed the trailer as soon as it dropped this week. His take “Paul Mescal muscles his way in with biff, bang and ouch” is a hoot.
5 This week I learned that there’s a cultural phenomenon that – surprise, surprise – “first exploded on social media” inspired by Robin Sharma’s book The 5am Club. His catchphrase is “Own your morning, elevate your life” and there are 17.5 million TikTok posts from show-offs sharing their #5amClub routines. Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan. Journalist Anita Chaudhur wrote about giving it a go.
ICYMI:
Our reports on Dáil sessions where Ministers give responses to questions give valuable insight into the failures in so many of our systems. On Wednesday we heard of vulnerable children who “disappeared” – without much fuss being made.
Podcast of the week:
Is it cheating to name your own podcast? Paul Howard, the prolific writer of the hilarious Ross O’Carroll Kelly books, talked to me on In the News about the death of his dog Humphrey and the grief of losing a much-loved pet. If you’re out for a walk this weekend (maybe with the dog), it’s a lovely listen.
Paul Howard on loving and losing his dog Humphrey
Best of the rest:
Stories about two of my favourite writers were both unsettling and depressing and prompted that age-old question of untangling the art from the artist. The Guardian headline Alice Munro knew my stepfather sexually abused me as a child, says Nobel laureate’s daughter captures the horror of the story.
Andrea Robin Skinner, the daughter of the Canadian short story writer, has alleged that her stepfather sexually abused her as a nine-year-old, and that Monro stayed with him even after he admitted the abuse. Fresh from seeing the exceptional film, That They May Face the Rising Sun, I read in the New York Review of Books, Anne Enright’s typically brilliant essay The High Irish Style, on John McGahern, the writer whose story it is based on, and came away considering him a repressed brute, with the treatment of his son and the boy’s mother particularly cruel.
Most Read:
- FT Cork 1-28 Limerick 0-29 as it happened: All-Ireland hurling semi-final
- Two men who died in Grand Canal in Dublin were known to homeless services
- Over the moon’: Tori Towey hopes to return to Ireland on Thursday after charges dropped in Dubai
- GP faces €40,000 severance payment to receptionist of nearly 50 years after failing to ‘engage’ with her
- Bláthnaid Raleigh ‘disappointed’ with response of Mullingar club after conviction of one of its players for rape
The week ahead
If the stakes weren’t so high – for the world – the noise around president Joe Biden’s fitness to run for office could be the stuff of a 12-part Netflix dramedy, preferably written by Armando Iannucci. This week’s very public interventions by Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney, and several US senators, ratchet up the momentum in the calls for him to step aside and with the Democratic convention getting closer, in the week ahead I’ll be glued to events in Washington.
