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Fintan O&x27TooleThe Irish Times |
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Halloween came late this year. The undead roamed the Earth on November 5th instead of October 31st. But the timing was nonetheless apt. The...
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,...
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...
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,...
Child abuse scandals are submersibles that plumb the murky depths of an institution’s mentality. They take us fathoms down into its otherwise...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
If, as now seems highly likely, Donald Trump wins back the American presidency in November, the consequences will be felt well beyond the United...
“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence.” President Joe Biden’s reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was...