Keyword "fintan-otoole" - List of latest news (144 results)

22/04 Fintan O’Toole: State has reached crisis of irresponsibility that resonates far beyond Grace’s grim story

Fintan O’Toole: This 30-year debacle should finally bring home to us the reality that official accountability does not exist

15/04 There’s a psychosexual dimension to Trump’s tariffs. You don’t have to be Freud to see it

When they bought into Trump, the tech bros purchased his whole inflated persona – every whim, craze and dark fantasy

08/04 Fintan O’Toole: The voice of the Almighty Dollar is shouting stop, Mr Trump

The most effective pushback against Donald Trump right now is a plunging financial graph

01/04 Fintan O’Toole: Boys want love, trust and intimacy just as much as girls do

There is nothing natural about male violence. Boys are growing up in a profoundly troubled culture

18/03 Fintan O’Toole: Why Trump is right about Ireland’s relationship with Big Pharma

Being honest about this helps to clarify where Ireland’s real interests lie

15/03 Kieran Cuddihy: ‘The fight for eyeballs is a hotter war than the fight for ears’

Presenter of the Tonight Show on Virgin Media and Hard Shoulder on Newstalk on Denis O’Brien, work-life balance and embarrassing career low-lights

11/03 Fintan O’Toole: A cunning plan to bring Saint Patrick’s writings to the White House

How should Micheál Martin deal with Donald Trump when he meets him in the White House?

04/03 Fintan O'Toole: Notion of Trump as a dealmaker is a way of avoiding the monstrous truth

Most European leaders seem to be genuinely astounded by Trump’s bullying, boorishness and blatant aggression. They had fooled themselves into believing what they wanted to believe

25/02 Fintan O’Toole: Trump and Musk’s war on science presents a startling opportunity for Ireland

Fintan O’Toole: Trump is complaining that we pick America’s pocket. Fair enough – we should instead pick America’s brains

18/02 Fintan O’Toole: Omagh victims and their families deserve better than ‘there was no alternative’

The distress, like the devil, is in the details. And yet we owe it to those witnesses to let these details pass through the filters we use to keep the unbearable at bay

11/02 Fintan O’Toole: American Caesar Donald Trump does not reward those who bend the knee – he despises them

The essential question for Ireland is: to grovel or not to grovel?

04/02 Fintan O’Toole: Does Micheál Martin understand his own brand?

In allowing himself to appear as the creature of Michael Lowry, the Taoiseach seems oblivious to the damage he is doing to his own character

28/01 Fintan O'Toole: An unfortunate incident of photobombing at the Áras highlights a big problem for our democracy

It’s hard to see how super juniors bringing “their own memos” to cabinet meetings for decision by Government can be lawful

21/01 Fintan O'Toole: What’s the dirtiest four-letter word in Irish politics? ‘Deal’

In the grey zones between deal and no deal, nothing will be written down for prying eyes to discover under FOI. We are back in the land of the unknown knowns

14/01 Fintan O’Toole: Five years after Covid, we scorn health workers, ignore vaccines and work in offices

What happened to the need to end commuting and presenteeism? Or to our gratitude for healthcare workers or our resolution to change how we care for older people?

07/01 Fintan O'Toole: It’s a national indignity that the new government will rely on Michael Lowry

There is a statute of limitations on civic virtue as Lowry is openly embraced as the power broker of the new government

31/12 Fintan O’Toole: 10 expert predictions about the world in 2025. All of them are wrong

When it comes to predicting the future, you might as well ask an astrologer as a rational expert

24/12 Fintan O’Toole: Christmas letters to my son in 1997, featuring Mary McAleese and 'the internet'

My family spent Christmas 1997 in New York. I recently found the letters that my then seven-year-old’s classmates wrote to him

20/12 Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan wins An Post Irish Book of the Year 2024

Author repeats success with sequel to his debut The Spinning Heart, which won award in 2012

17/12 Fintan O’Toole: We’re heading for the second biggest fiscal disaster in the history of the State

The idea that the Green Party was making us all go too far too fast is the exact opposite of the truth

10/12 Fintan O’Toole: I suspect this ‘Spit on me, Dickie!’ was an urban legend. Dickie Rock was more safety valve than satanic threat

There were soon much more exotic ways to be a teenager than going into violent hysterics for Dickie Rock, but for a time, he filled the gap between who Irish teenagers were and who they were supposed to be

07/12 ‘Ireland keeps you honest’: Fintan O’Toole on his four decades writing about a changing country

The Irish Times columnist has made a new documentary about his life for RTÉ. Here he looks back on a career that he began as the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex

02/12 Fintan O’Toole: Irish voters keep doing the same things and expecting different results

The State is entering a holding pattern, circling a future somewhere between high anxiety and extraordinary opportunity

26/11 Fintan O'Toole: Ireland stumbled into the fiscal garden of Eden. We could just as suddenly be turfed out

State’s short-term future is shaped simultaneously by wild optimism and existential anxiety

19/11 Fintan O'Toole: The three transparent election lies even politicians can’t pretend to believe

The extremely self-conscious uncoupling of the two centre-right parties is so obviously an act, it’s like a game of cards in which the stakes are matchsticks. But Sinn Féin isn’t much better

16/11 The Routledge History of Irish America: A vast and comprehensive study of all aspects of the Irish-American experience

Vigorous and critically minded history proves that the shifting and sometimes contradictory ‘social construct’ of Irish America cannot be reduced to one singular identity

12/11 Fintan O'Toole: We have entered a no-man’s land, an age of dizzying transitions

The far right has been much better than the left at giving voters the illusion that it has an accurate map across these liminal spaces

07/11 Fintan O'Toole: Trump’s openly authoritarian instincts are about to be unleashed

It is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think 'this too will pass'

05/11 Fintan O'Toole: Cowboy builders can ride away from their fire trap buildings and saddle up for another rodeo

No prosecutions, no financial costs, no names and damn all shame

22/10 Sinn Féin responds to child abuse more or less as the Catholic hierarchy did

Dress Cardinal McDonald and her bishops in episcopal robes and it’s a movie we’ve all seen before

15/10 Fintan O'Toole: Chasm between political decision making and its consequences is wider than the Gap of Dunloe

Take Ireland’s top manufacturer of insulation - not Kingspan, but the HSE. It creates layers of impenetrable padding between political decision-makers and the consequences

08/10 Fintan O'Toole: I take no pleasure in saying that Hamas is winning

Israel is putting all its eggs in Donald Trump’s grubby basket, banking on an alliance with a man whose friendship tends to be more toxic than his enmity

30/09 Fintan O’Toole: Government has a windfall of cash but no coherent sense of how to spend it

We have a windfall – but the golden apples seem to have fallen on our heads. Our governing culture has lost its great get-out clause: ‘If only we had the money…'

30/09 Any ‘ideological clash’ of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is two bald men fighting over a comb

We have a windfall – but the golden apples seem to have fallen on our heads. Our governing culture has lost its great get-out clause: ‘If only we had the money…'

27/09 Emer McLysaght: Sally Rooney would never heave out a simile likening a person to the winter solstice sun, as I just have

My comedic, commercial fiction has been described as ‘fluffy’ or ‘an easy read’ more times than my heart and ego can take

24/09 Fintan O'Toole: It’s all eyes on the election now and children don’t have a vote

Hey, kids – we have a roadmap. Just hang on in there and try not to get too angry and ashamed about being poor in a rich country

23/09 Sally Rooney: what the critics say about her new novel, Intermezzo

Plus, what the writer said in conversation with Fintan O’Toole in the National Concert Hall on Saturday

17/09 Fintan O'Toole: Ireland fixates on the ghosts of the past, and is blind to the abuses still happening

Somehow we can only feel the pain of abused and abandoned children in safe retrospect, when it is brought to light after decades underground

12/09 How to Be a Citizen by Cindy L Skach: Has too much law withered democracy?

The central, compelling argument is that public space is a vital but sorely neglected component of a functioning democracy

10/09 Fintan O'Toole on schools sex-abuse inquiry: 'It was open season on children’s bodies. These men did what they liked'

We called the predatory paedophile in my school Little Plum. We all learned early the required habits of toxic silence

03/09 Fintan O'Toole: The cataract bus is like all great Irish inventions, the fruit of carelessness and clientelism

The bus to Belfast for cataract surgery is a brilliant bit of political entrepreneurship, but it clouds the reality that healthcare is a right and we, the public, pay for all these treatments

27/08 Fintan O'Toole: Behind Kamala Harris’s megawatt smile at the convention, I saw a ruthless machine at work

The Democrats have generated an equal and opposite reaction to their own culpable inertia, a unity of purpose that makes them much more like the Republicans. It’s not always pretty to watch

20/08 Fintan O'Toole: How apt that Democratic convention marks the demise of the last old-style Irish Catholic politician

The 1968 convention was the last hurrah for a phenomenon of huge importance in our own history: the Irish-American political machine. How apt that this week’s convention will mark the reluctant end of the career of Joe Biden

13/08 Fintan O’Toole: Elon Musk, the Pablo Escobar of disinformation, basks in his own impunity

The eejits who get caught have been hooked by algorithms engineered by social media companies

09/08 Migration and emigration

The immigration policies of all political parties warrant scrutiny

06/08 Fintan O'Toole: Ireland has gone from an emigrant society to an immigrant-emigrant society

Ireland has become far better at creating jobs, and like every other place where there are work opportunities, it attracts people who want to make a better life for themselves

06/08 Fintan O'Toole: Emigration was a central fact of Irish culture. Now immigration can taken its place

Ireland has become far better at creating jobs, and like every other place where there are work opportunities, it attracts people who want to make a better life for themselves

30/07 Fintan O'Toole: With all the confidence of a hostage in a ransom video, Catherine Martin began dismantling RTÉ

No one in Government has put forward any justification for hollowing out RTÉ. But, in an age when trusted information has never been more vital to the defence of democracy, that is what it is doing

16/07 Fintan O'Toole: The far right is just a Farage away from breaking through into Irish politics

Protofascist ideas are at least as prevalent in Ireland as in other Western democracies and the reactionary, nativist mindset is well established here. All the movement is lacking is a leader

15/07 For his already fanatical devotees Trump’s survival will add to his messianic appeal

That Trump became a victim of the very violence he has done so much to validate will not provoke either him or his fans to think again. It will merely serve to fortify a mindset in which America is already at war with itself

08/07 Fintan O’Toole: Keir Starmer needs to start thinking and talking about Brexit

Politics has become an adventure holiday: white-water rafting with Brexit, bungee jumping with Trump

02/07 Joe Biden’s insistence on running again in November is an old man’s folly

Fintan O’Toole: If the Democrats persist with Joe Biden, the United States is in imminent danger of being handed back to a Trump who is vastly more malign than he was in 2016

02/07 Fintan O’Toole: Democrats and their media allies pretended everything was fine. It’s not fine

Fintan O’Toole: If the Democrats persist with Joe Biden, the United States is in imminent danger of being handed back to a Trump who is vastly more malign than he was in 2016

25/06 Fintan O'Toole: Cathal Crotty’s suspended sentence another example of how judicial system is failing women

The administration of justice for violent men is out of kilter with our values and we can no longer suspend disbelief

18/06 Fintan O’Toole: Religious orders are sharing their records north of the Border and concealing them in the South

To treat these records with such contempt is to repeat the contempt shown by Church and State to thousands of women and children

09/06 Overheard: Developer Paddy Kelly suffers again, this time with the RTB’s maximum €60,000 rent arrears bill

Ditch journalist Roman Shortall settles his own rent bill; Siún Ní Raghallaigh has her say; and U2′s Dublin plans fall through again

04/06 Fintan O’Toole: There’s one fundamental reason we have a housing crisis

The wealthier the State has become, the more money it shells just to find homeless families a bed for the night

04/06 Fintan O’Toole: There’s one fundamantal reason we have a housing crisis

The wealthier the State has become, the more money it shells just to find homeless families a bed for the night

28/05 Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is poor at innovation, but a world-class producer of complacency and self-satisfaction

It’s not about the failure of lone geniuses to have eureka moments in the bath. It’s not caused by the lack of work ethic. It’s about the collective environment from which innovative and sustainable companies emerge

20/05 Fintan O’Toole: Tony O’Reilly’s secret past shaped his need to play the life of an Ascendancy landlord

It’s hard to avoid the belief that something of his anomalous origins must have been present in what O’Reilly became

18/05 Fintan O’Toole: Dublin portal reminds us that our capital has an uneasy edge of wildness

Fintan O’Toole: The erection of the portal linking night-time inner city Dublin to daytime New York was a heroic act of denial

14/05 Fintan O'Toole: Ireland is still not sure how to confront its most formative trauma

That the world’s largest collection of visual art and printed materials relating to the Great Famine is in storage in America is a grim story of what happens when a nation fails to take ownership of a central part of its own history

07/05 Fintan O’Toole: A hard Border is now a patriotic cause - and we laughed at the Brits for that kind of nonsense

Giving these gifts to the 'Ireland is full' mob borders on the insane.

30/04 Fintan O'Toole: Catastrophic decline of wild Irish salmon is another of the slow scandals of Irish life

Over the last few decades, we’ve driven the salmon from our rivers, recklessly but ruthlessly

23/04 Fintan O'Toole: Have we ditched the Stardust-era stereotype that the working classes are wild and reckless?

Both reports unknowingly unleashed demons of prejudice that were hidden in the Id of the Irish establishment.

15/04 Fintan O'Toole: Biden and the West have been sleepwalking into a Middle East war. Now it is becoming a reality

Fear of nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War led West to do three very stupid things. What we’re seeing play out are the consequences

09/04 Fintan O'Toole: If Israel succeeds in Gaza, it will drag the West down with it

Israel is the child of the very international order it is now helping to destroy

02/04 Fine Gael’s choice to replace a property-owning democracy with a rent-paying one has unsettled a generation

And that’s just one of the big problems Simon Harris will face as taoiseach

26/03 Fintan O’Toole: Simon Harris has risen without trace, another case of survival of the smoothest

His trajectory is proof that however you get to the top in Irish politics, it is not by fixing things

19/03 Fintan O'Toole: Lidl wants MetroLink redesigned so it can build apartments. And you pay the bill

There’s an interesting thing about this massive development: it doesn’t exist. It is an outline drawing of a possible notion

11/03 Invited to replace a potent 1930s vision with a wishy-washy 2020s gesture, voters said no

What has taken the place of Catholic doctrine as a governing ideology is a passionless managerialism

05/03 Fintan O'Toole: If the care referendum is such a progressive change, why was the process such a travesty?

Even if the Government’s wording were not so wretched, there would be good grounds to vote against it to protest against the process of its creation

27/02 Fintan O’Toole: Catherine Martin can save her political career and do something big for Irish democracy

RTÉ is a toxic brew whose commercial business and profit-seeking push stale content, ads and inflated salaries at the expense of public service

20/02 Fintan O'Toole: Absent RTÉ witnesses make committee hearings a cross between Waiting for Godot and Where’s Wally?

When eight invited witnesses are unable to attend, the joke is on us. The public has a right to know how its money is being spent

13/02 Fintan O'Toole: The Government’s plan for people like me is bizarre and self-sabotaging

Now I’m about to turn 66, the Government wants me to delay taking my State pension. So why penalise me for remaining in the workforce?

06/02 Fintan O’Toole: Dee Forbes’s illness has implications that radiate far beyond Montrose

It is an absolute requirement of democracy that those who exercise such power are accountable

30/01 Fintan O’Toole: Idea that article 41.2 had no real-life consequences is rubbish. Just ask the Aer Lingus ‘girls’

What’s most extraordinary is that women themselves accepted that paid work was a male prerogative

25/01 Fintan O’Toole: People trusted Ivor Browne with their darkest secrets. He was one of Ireland’s great liberators

Few did more to remove the barriers that separated mentally ill people from the rest of society

23/01 Fintan O'Toole: It is utterly absurd to claim “Roscrea is full”. Its real problem is depopulation

For the North Tipperary town and others, the ability to attract migrants should be a source of pride and energy rather than fear and suspicion

23/01 State must provide school choice reflecting the education parents want for their children

Catholic Church has indicated its willingness to assist the State in providing for a plurality of schools, and has positively engaged in a process to achieve reconfiguration of patronage at primary level

16/01 We know all about the fear of ‘unvetted’ single male migrants. We were their chief exporter

How do young male asylum seekers in Ireland now compare to their Irish migrant counterparts in England in the 1960s?

09/01 Fintan O'Toole: It’s striking how brazen and open the incitement against Irish Jews has become

Hatred of Jews is not a ‘response’ to Israeli violence, but the mass killing of Palestinian civilians creates a space in which it can show itself in all its naked savagery

05/01 Fintan O’Toole: Irish Times columnist wins US journalism award for ‘incisive’ political commentary

O’Toole’s work combines wry humour with serious scholarship, judges for Robert B Silvers prize say

02/01 Ireland was a country of secrets, but have we become a nation of oversharers?

There was one column I was never able to write, though now it would be utterly unremarkable

25/12 Fintan O'Toole: We have two Christmases: the one we experience and the one we remember

Christmas is better expressed through poetry, not prose. Prose typically deals in the raw stuff of lived experience, while poetry is strained through memory

21/12 Fintan O’Toole: Enoch Burke is no freak. His extreme logic was part of Irish education for years

This country has often allowed the rights of those who believe they are acting in God’s name to trump those of students

19/12 Fintan O'Toole: Slaughter of innocents cannot be easy for the perpetrators, but their tears are for themselves

For the commanders and politicians who give the orders, the killing of children is the ultimate expression of power. It shows the absolute loyalty of the foot soldiers

12/12 Fintan O'Toole: Referendum wording doesn’t remove conservative 1930s doctrine. It reinforces it

Proposed wording for gender equality referendum is worse than useless: a gesture that indicates the lack of intention to give women the chance to be fully equal citizens

05/12 Fintan O'Toole: Could Conor McGregor be Ireland’s Donald Trump? Absolutely

He immensely famous, with a fervent fan base and a genius for personal branding

28/11 Fintan O'Toole: Irish fascism is not a reaction to immigration or poverty. It’s not even new

It is grossly unfair to inner city communities to stigmatise them as the sources of a shameful night in Dublin

24/11 Fintan O'Toole: These pitiful thugs do not act for us, speak for us, or burn buses for us

Dublin riots: While humanity is capable of the worst atrocities, it is not defined by them. We are – really – better than this

21/11 Fintan O'Toole: Two US hotels should have plaques reading ‘Conservative Ireland died here’

Radioactive fallout from two separate detonations in American hotels drifted over the Atlantic and settled on Ireland. This was history as chaos theory

14/11 Fintan O'Toole: In Ireland we barely talk about immigration. It’s easy to see why

We should be able to discuss the fact that one in five people originates from elsewhere

07/11 Fintan O'Toole: Ireland is taking a risk with its stance on Gaza, but someone has to

Insisting on one standard in a world of double standards makes for difficult moments with friends and allies, but it is easier than twisting in the wind

31/10 Fintan O’Toole: Israel can take Gaza. But it cannot leave it

What will remain after Israel’s fury is spent? Collective punishment is not justice. Scorched earth is not security. Desolation is not peace

24/10 Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is weirdly entwined with the idea of a Jewish homeland, but not in the way many imagine

Militant Irish nationalists prefer to forget that two future right-wing prime ministers of Israel were profoundly inspired by the IRA

17/10 Fintan O’Toole: In the Israel-Hamas war, humanity only means ‘people like us’

All that levelling Gaza will achieve in the longer term is to remind Israel itself that it borders on an abyss

10/10 Fintan O'Toole: Refusing to address someone by their preferred pronouns may not be unlawful, but it is rude

Withholding someone’s chosen name has long been a way of asserting power over them: it’s why all the Irish were Micks, Paddies or Bridgets

03/10 Fintan O'Toole: For years Ireland has been doing something just as fiscally stupid as Brexit

Consigning children to poverty is morally and politically wrong. But it makes no fiscal sense either

01/10 It’s time for the State to declare war on dereliction

IT Sunday

01/10 Dr Tony Bates: ‘Just because you have trauma in your life doesn’t make you a nice person. If you’re hurt you pass that on’

In his painfully honest new book, the distinguished clinical psychologist discusses his own issues with depression and his concerns about the state of mental healthcare today

26/09 Fintan O'Toole: If Russell Brand and Rupert Murdoch are not part of the elite, then who is?

If Russell Brand says he’s the victim of a conspiracy theory and Rupert Murdoch insists he’s rebel outsider, so-called ‘mainstream media’ must be the true counterculture

18/09 Fintan O'Toole: In Russell Brand’s world, seeing is disbelieving and the accuser is accused

Brand would have us believe it’s not just his reputation but reality itself that is at stake

13/09 Child poverty office targets ‘helicopter role’ to ensure all agencies deliver

End Child Poverty Week event also heard programmes in Scotland, Finland and New Zealand had provided inspiration

12/09 Fintan O'Toole: Here’s the big idea this Government needs. End the misery of 40,000 children

On October 10th, Michael McGrath could stand up in the Dáil and release 40,000 Irish children from the prison of poverty

07/09 Why did the EPA delete a tweet about eating meat?

At a time of climate crisis it’s time to factor sustainability into dietary guidelines

05/09 Fintan O’Toole: The West must help Ukraine to define victory differently

If Putin died tomorrow, there’s no chance a democratic peacenik would replace him. The war has reshaped Russian society in ways that make autocracy even more secure

02/09 Sinn Féin has come a hell of a long way. But it had a hell of a long way to go

Fintan O’Toole: The way to protect democracy is always through more and deeper democracy: more checks and balances, more effective means of calling those in power to account

29/08 Fintan O’Toole: The only difference between a good migrant and a bad one is time

Over time, strange people who came among us after terrible journeys ceased to be so strange. They became known, human, individual; not a threat but an enrichment

26/08 Seamus Heaney, by Fintan O’Toole: His death 10 years ago was ‘the end of a great eloquence’

Benign but not bland, temperate but not soft, the late poet is irreplaceable as a public figure

22/08 Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ should have seen a crisis coming for decades

Broadcaster has grappled with the same dilemma since the 1960s: to be a national jukebox or a national broadcaster

20/08 Fintan O’Toole: Five things that the HSE is getting wrong

Almost two decades of HSE ‘reforms’ have not made the slightest improvement to its collective culture

19/08 Fintan O’Toole: The only thing Tubridy seemed truly sorry for was himself

He has held stubbornly to a fiction, so stubbornly that it seems he might actually believe it

15/08 Fintan O’Toole: All my life there have been climate warnings. We’re ingenious at ignoring them

Climate change has been fully understood for decades. It has been perfectly possible not to grasp or feel it

12/08 Ireland has stark physical deficits, from housing to public transport to medical centres to basics such as sewage and water

Fintan O’Toole: To adapt what Brendan Behan once said about Dublin Bay, you don’t swim off Ballyvaughan, you just go through the motions

08/08 Farmers encouraged to believe action to control climate chaos is a plot against them

Farmers are in strange denial about the climate emergency partly because political parties, especially Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have shaped their attitudes

01/08 Fintan O’Toole: Sinéad O’Connor’s openness was a curse for her but a blessing for us

The singer shattered our perfect circle of denial about abuse and trauma. If you had been abused and traumatised, you were probably half-cracked and since you were half-cracked, who could believe you?

25/07 Fintan O’Toole: A tiny area of Dublin is Ireland’s most segregated district

The poorest part of inner-city Dublin is the triangle formed by the Customs House, the Royal Canal and the Liffey

22/07 Fintan O’Toole: Why is the State investing billions in projects that depend on goodwill of property owners?

There is one phrase that does not appear anywhere in Government’s outdoor recreation strategy: ‘right of way’, the great unmentionable

22/07 The best books of 2023 so far: Anne Enright, Joseph O’Connor, Liz Nugent, Colm Tóibín and more have their say

We round up some opinions on the finest reads this year which you might think worth bringing on holidays with you

18/07 Fintan O’Toole: How to survive a scandal and get everyone to forgive you

About 1,500 years ago, Ireland’s monks solved one of the great problems of humanity: how to atone for sin

15/07 Ireland is uncomfortable with any criticism of US actions, even when they are wrong

Fintan O’Toole: Our foreign policy should have moral consistency

12/07 Fintan O’Toole: In the end, Ryan Tubridy resorted to the Father Ted defence

The broadcaster had three tasks in the most important live show of his career

11/07 Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ bureaucrats fantasised they could turn themselves into Broadway impresarios

The broadcaster piddled away €2.2m on the Toy Show vanity project, while showing an increasingly obvious disdain for its cultural remit

08/07 Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ must change or die

Catherine Martin has been a quietly revolutionary minister for the arts, the best we’ve had since Michael D Higgins a quarter of a century ago

04/07 Fintan O’Toole: Noel Kelly is not Ryan Tubridy’s Father Confessor. He’s his attack dog

I don’t believe in the pernicious myth of the starving artist – everybody is entitled to enough money for a dignified life. But too much money is as corrosive as too little

01/07 A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell: A brilliant exercise in the uncanny

Book about double murderer Malcolm Macarthur is an exercise in the uncanny

01/07 Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ abandoned the public interest during Covid and capitulated to Tubridy’s tone-deaf demands

This sorry episode shows how far the crassness of consumer culture has eroded the instincts of good citizenship

27/06 Fintan O’Toole: Ryan Tubridy chose silence instead of speaking out. An extended silence should follow

Broadcaster had a moral duty to call out falsehoods he was uniquely placed to discern. But in his telling, it was all a matter for somebody else

24/06 Irish neutrality: A tiny Riverdance of angels dancing on the head of a Fáinne pin

Fintan O’Toole: How do we define Ireland’s ‘security’ in an age of climate chaos, mass migration and the rise of authoritarianism?

20/06 Fintan O’Toole: Murky links between your iPhone, our tax take and companies drilling in Carlow

The genius of globalised capitalism is to make us forget that everything is connected

17/06 Fintan O’Toole: The demise of the Kinahans will usher in another equally vile crew

Fintan O’Toole: If the War on Drugs is a giant trial conducted across the globe for over half a century, the empirical results are incontrovertible: drugs have won the war hands down

13/06 Fintan O’Toole: The ominous difference between Johnson and Trump

The masters of political bombast, who mass-mobilised self-pity, are now eerily in synch

10/06 Fintan O’Toole: All records of all church-run institutions should be nationalised now

State courts committed children to these hellholes, religious orders should not have control of files

06/06 Fintan O’Toole: Can Sinn Féin bring the political system back into line with Irish society?

The three pillars of Irish politics – the Church-State alliance, party tribalism and clientelism – are crumbling

04/06 IT Sunday: Census shows there are more of us, but is a growing population reason for concern?

Census finds Ireland’s Polish community is getting smaller – why are Poles returning home?

03/06 Fintan O’Toole: The far right gives power to the most obnoxious little gits

What would Irish politics really look like if a clever and magnetic leader were to emerge from the far right?

30/05 Fintan O’Toole: What if Sinn Féin makes Northern Ireland viable?

Sinn Féin has abandoned both anti-capitalism and the principle of making Northern Ireland unworkable, adopting economic policies that are not much to the left of the Republic’s mainstream

27/05 Fintan O’Toole: Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday allows us to reflect on a dark century

Fintan O’Toole: The centenarian embodies, perhaps more than anyone else, the failure of the United States to learn the moral lessons of the 20th century’s most catastrophic depravities

23/05 Fintan O’Toole: There’s a reason children have become more violent towards other children

Referring to children subjected to extreme bullying by their peers as men and women helps us to keep at bay the knowledge that our children inflict violence on other children all the time

16/05 Fintan O’Toole: If we follow the money, the destination is a United Ireland

But it’s not quite that simple. Irish nationalists know that economic self-interest doesn’t determine our political actions and identities

13/05 Fintan O’Toole: I may well write rubbish, but I don’t write ‘bulls**t’

The difference between what I would write on a subject and what ChatGPT concocts is that I have an opinion and the bot doesn’t

09/05 Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s giant open-air experiment on property has failed

Letting the market decide has been a colossal failure – the Irish economy, left to itself, cannot and will not match capital investment to human needs for shelter and security

05/05 Fintan O’Toole: The more hollow the crown, the more splendidly the jewels encrusting it must shine

The problem is that this show is a giant signifier with very little left to signify