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Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O&x27Toole

The Irish Times

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Boys want love, trust and intimacy just as much as girls do

yesterday 5

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Ireland’s delightful love triangle is ending in a nasty divorce

25.03.2025 30

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Donald Trump is right about Ireland’s relationship with Big Pharma

18.03.2025 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

A cunning plan to bring Saint Patrick’s writings to the White House

11.03.2025 30

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

The idea of Trump the dealmaker avoids a monstrous truth

04.03.2025 30

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Trump and Musk’s war on science presents a startling opportunity for Ireland

25.02.2025 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Omagh victims and their families deserve better than ‘there was no alternative’ to violence

18.02.2025 8

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Trump’s adoption of imperial manner is a function of failure

11.02.2025 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Does Micheál Martin understand his own brand?

04.02.2025 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

An unfortunate incident of photobombing at the Áras highlights big problem for our democracy

28.01.2025 30

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

What’s the dirtiest four-letter word in Irish politics? ‘Deal’

21.01.2025 9

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Five years after Covid, we scorn health workers, ignore vaccines and work in our offices

14.01.2025 60

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

It’s a national indignity that the new government will rely on Michael Lowry

In 1944, when France was liberated from the Nazis, its restored republic faced a dilemma. The normal process of law could not deal with the tens of...

07.01.2025 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: 10 expert predictions about the world in 2025. All of them are wrong

I thought about making some predictions for 2025. And then I had a look at a detailed report drawn up in 2008 by the US National Intelligence...

31.12.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

‘Our class is on the internet’ ... ‘Mary McAleese is the president.’ Christmas letters to my son, 1997

The Christmas of 1997 was the first one we spent away from home. I had gone to work as drama critic of the Daily News in New York. My wife took a...

24.12.2024 4

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

We’re heading for the second biggest fiscal disaster in the history of the State

The new Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael administration will be like a tanker that has to get into a tricky port but has just managed to scupper its tugboat....

17.12.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Dickie Rock was more a safety valve than a satanic threat

My brother Patrick, the last of my parents’ six children, was born in March 1966, on the night a crazed offshoot of the IRA blew up Nelson’s Pillar...

10.12.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: Irish voters keep doing the same things and expecting different results

It would be a silly exaggeration to call any general election a non-event. But in this case the overstatement would be slight. The things that did...

02.12.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Ireland stumbled accidentally into the fiscal garden of Eden. We could suddenly be turfed out

Windfall is a lovely word, redolent of mists and mellow fruitfulness. It has a delicate, poetic character unsuited to the rough and rowdy ways of...

26.11.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

The three transparent election lies even politicians can’t pretend to believe

Why does the election campaign seem so dull? Not, I think, because so much of it is dishonest – but rather because the dishonesty is so...

19.11.2024 3

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

We have entered a no man’s land, an age of dizzying transitions

Halloween came late this year. The undead roamed the Earth on November 5th instead of October 31st. But the timing was nonetheless apt. The...

12.11.2024 4

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Donald Trump’s openly authoritarian instincts are about to be unleashed

This is America now. It is a country that sees its authentic self reflected most clearly in the figure of a sexual predator, a racist, a misogynist,...

07.11.2024 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Cowboy builders ride away from their fire trap buildings and saddle up for another rodeo

A tip for the coming election: don’t believe any promises that are not accompanied by a revolution in accountability. For without it, very little...

05.11.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Trump 2.0 would be fascism tempered by senility

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference in upstate New York, where the American writer and film-maker Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm,...

29.10.2024 4

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Sinn Féin responds to child abuse more or less as the Catholic hierarchy did

Child abuse scandals are submersibles that plumb the murky depths of an institution’s mentality. They take us fathoms down into its otherwise...

22.10.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Chasm between political decision making and its consequences is wider than the Gap of Dunloe

The great line in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is the description of the absent father as “a telephone man who fell in love with long...

15.10.2024 4

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

I take no pleasure in saying that Hamas is winning

A year on from the atrocities of October 7th, the perpetrators are winning. Hamas is vicious but it is not stupid. It knew (and did not care) that...

08.10.2024 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Government has a windfall of cash but no coherent sense of how to spend it

With Budget 2025 upon us, an old phrase comes to mind: more money than sense. The State has an almost surreal surplus of €25 billion. But it has no...

30.09.2024 6

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Any ‘ideological clash’ of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is two bald men fighting over a comb

With Budget 2025 upon us, an old phrase comes to mind: more money than sense. The State has an almost surreal surplus of €25 billion. But it has no...

30.09.2024 5

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

It’s all eyes on the election now and children don’t have a vote

Word of the week: pusillanimous. Meaning, literally, small-minded and, by extension, cowardly, timid, faint-hearted. It seems to have dropped out...

24.09.2024 7

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Ireland fixates on the ghosts of the past, and is blind to the abuses still happening

A strange, haunting, ever-returning image of Ireland is exhumation. The title of Hilary Mantel’s novel Bring Up The Bodies is surely one that ought...

17.09.2024 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Schools sexual abuse inquiry: It was open season on children’s bodies. These men did what they liked

I’ve never figured out why we named our familiar paedophile after a comic caricature of a Native American. In 1971, when I entered Coláiste...

10.09.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

The cataract bus is, like all great Irish inventions, the fruit of carelessness and clientelism

To the cream cracker, the rasher and the cheese-and-onion crisp, we should add another great Irish invention: the cataract bus. For if you want to...

03.09.2024 5

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Behind Kamala Harris’s megawatt smile at the convention, I saw a ruthless machine at work

The thin blue line suddenly got a lot thicker. The Democratic Party is all that stands between the world and the triumph of autocracy in the United...

27.08.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

How apt that Democratic convention marks the passing of the last old-style Irish Catholic politician

For the Democratic Party, going back to Chicago for its convention is rather like the Rolling Stones deciding to return to Altamont and stage a...

20.08.2024 4

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Elon Musk, the Pablo Escobar of disinformation, basks in his own impunity

One law for the megarich provocateur, another for the poor idiots who follow his lead. The idea of two-tier policing – the false allegation that...

13.08.2024 40

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Ireland has gone from an emigrant society to an immigrant-emigrant society

It’s a strange thought that in the same week that Simon Harris was born, in October 1987, the then minister for foreign affairs Brian Lenihan gave...

06.08.2024 3

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Emigration was a central fact of Irish culture. Now immigration can taken its place

It’s a strange thought that in the same week that Simon Harris was born, in October 1987, the then minister for foreign affairs Brian Lenihan gave...

06.08.2024 20

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Fintan O’Toole: With all the confidence of a hostage in a ransom video, Catherine Martin began dismantling RTÉ

I was going to write that the Government’s “plan” for RTÉ is a dog’s dinner, but the Irish Times lawyers warned that this would risk multiple...

30.07.2024 10

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

Joe Biden has ended the agony. The Democrats now have a fighting chance to save the American republic

On Saturday afternoon, while Joe Biden was reaching the tormented end of his losing struggle with old age, I happened to be in Galway at Garry...

22.07.2024 7

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

The far right is just a Farage away from breaking through in Irish politics

If, as now seems highly likely, Donald Trump wins back the American presidency in November, the consequences will be felt well beyond the United...

16.07.2024 8

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole

For his already fanatical devotees Trump’s survival will add to his messianic appeal

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence.” President Joe Biden’s reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was...

15.07.2024 8

The Irish Times

Fintan O&x27Toole