Search the Archives

MARTIN BOWS TO TRUMP ON GAZA

Date: January 23, 2025 -

The timing of Micheál Martin and the Government’s adoption of the pro-Israeli definition of antisemitism drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is extraordinary. It was discussed secretly, hidden from the electorate during the general election campaign and subsequent government negotiations, and lacks any mandate – explicit or implicit. It effectively endorses the… Read more »

PROFILE: MICHAEL LOWRY

Date: January 23, 2025 -

DESCRIPTIONS OF Michael Lowry as ‘kingmaker’ in government formation talks have been rejected by Micheál Martin and Simon Harris, who argue that the TD has been elected by voters in Tipperary. The trouble is, leaders of the same Government parties demanded that Lowry resign from the Dáil – regardless of Tipperary voters – back in… Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: PÁDRAIG MAC BRÁDAIGH

Date: January 23, 2025 -

IN THE spring of 2024, Pádraig Mac Brádaigh was elected as the first ever Irish-language officer of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU). In the last year, he has spearheaded the campaign for the promotion of the Irish language on Trinity’s campus. However, despite being elected by a landslide vote, not everyone has supported his… Read more »

PRESIDENT HIGGINS UNDER ATTACK!

Date: January 23, 2025 -

IT WAS hardly surprising that when President Michael D Higgins had the temerity, at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition, to speak out against militarisation and Nato secretary general Mark Rutte’s call for a significant increase in defence budgets, that he came in for flak. How could an elected head of state, one of whose roles… Read more »

BEN SCALLAN’S PLATFORM

Date: January 23, 2025 -

Francis Duffy, the Archbishop of Tuam, may have been surprised to receive criticism on the archdiocese Facebook page after a notice was posted promoting a discussion to be held at the end of this month entitled ‘Faith in a Faithless World.’ The panel includes assorted Catholic players such as Senator Ronan Mullen; MMA fighter Ciarán… Read more »

MOLLY, MY IRISH MOLLY: ZAPPONE IS BACK

Date: January 23, 2025 -

MEDIAHUIS GROUP political editor Philip Ryan restored some semblance of balance in the daily Indo to coverage of Katherine Zappone’s return to Ireland and her intended assumption of a Seanad seat following quite the impressive snow job by Sarah Caden in the Sindo. Caden obligingly provided readers with then foreign minister Simon Coveney’s explanation for… Read more »

NIAMH TALLON’S SPORTING PROWESS

Date: January 23, 2025 -

CONGRATULATIONS TO Niamh Tallon, the founder of something called Her Sport Media Ltd (HSM), which has just landed a €10,000 grant from Coimisiún na Meán (the media commission) to help with the hosting of this weekend’s rather well-sponsored Her Sports Awards 2025 in Belfield. The commission has provided the handouts to a variety of players… Read more »

FERGAL FOLEY FORMENTS REVOLT

Date: January 23, 2025 -

THERE IS mutiny brewing in the Law Library, where venerable junior counsel Fergal Foley is set to lead the disgruntled criminal legal eagles into battle over the failure of the Government to return the fees paid to barristers engaged in legal aid criminal matters to pre-crash levels. The hapless lawyers claim to have taken a… Read more »

VOL 43 NO 02

Date: January 23, 2025 -

MAURICE REGAN’S LATEST MOVE

Date: January 23, 2025 -

GOLDHAWK WAS not overly surprised to see one Maurice Regan riding to the rescue of toe-tapper Michael Flatley this month. It is presumably no coincidence that the Lord of the Dance’s sprawling Castlehyde estate neighbours John Magnier’s Coolmore base. Regan is the Kerry-born, New York-based construction magnate, who made a fortune across the Atlantic in… Read more »

LEGAL EAGLE

Date: January 23, 2025 -

James Paul Foley, formerly known as boring old Paul Foley, has come a cropper with the Law Society, which has initiated disciplinary proceedings against him in relation to his practice, JP Foley & Co, which closed down in Sandymount. The solicitor subsequently transferred to another practice but his clients have been informed that, as a… Read more »

MUSK FARAGE SPLIT

Date: January 23, 2025 -

THE SPLIT between Elon Musk and Nigel Farage is because the latter distanced himself from British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who is currently in jail for violating an injunction. But Tommy has friends in low places in Ireland too and has backed hard-line loyalists as well as British paratrooper Soldier F, who has been charged… Read more »

MR ‘NICE GUY’, JUDGE MCNULTY

Date: January 23, 2025 -

QUALIFIED BARRISTER Bartholomew Anthony O’Neill told Judge James G McNulty in September 2023 that he had never practised as a barrister but he got a taste of the judicial process in Macroom District Court that day. An Irish Times report told last week how O’Neill successfully overturned a conviction for allegedly holding a mobile phone… Read more »

CHINESE WHISKEY SOUR

Date: January 23, 2025 -

THIS WEEK a Chinese national named Yan Ma has been in the High Court seeking a summary judgment against Nephin Whiskey Company Ltd (NWC). The action relates to €½m she says she invested in the distillery project, under the hugely controversial Immigrant Investor Programme (IIP), which was eventually shut down by an exasperated Department of… Read more »

THE NAME IS MITTY, WALTER MITTY

Date: January 23, 2025 -

The Irish News last week published a front-page story about London gangster and convicted killer Paul Cleeland with the headline: “MI5 recruited me to murder five people during the Troubles”. Goldhawk is not impressed. Cleeland, now 82, claims that MI5 tested his mettle by asking him to shoot a drunken tramp in a pig sty in the… Read more »

IRISH RIGHT’S FAR-OFF FRIENDS

Date: January 23, 2025 -

The failure of new Irish right-wing parties to gain an electoral breakthrough has resulted in many of their members seemingly more concerned with developments internationally than with issues at home. Keith Woods of the National Party (NP) has been keen to promote Remigration Summit 25, a gathering of white nationalists in Europe planned for May…. Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: January 23, 2025 -

The one I’m most excited about – I’ve had a couple of emails that said, “I watched the tango and afterwards I told my parents that I’m gay”. Dancing With The Stars contestant Gearóid Farrelly on the impact of his dance moves, Irish Independent A billionaire innovator and entrepreneur with time to parse history’s great… Read more »

TRUMP RULES HERE TOO

Date: January 23, 2025 -

IT HAS long been understood that the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael element of the outgoing coalition Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of an even vaguely climate-friendly agenda by their oh-so annoying Green Party junior partners. Simon Harris and especially Micheál Martin were quite capable of talking a good fight on… Read more »

END TO BUSINESS AS USUAL

Date: January 23, 2025 -

A recent landmark High Court judgment has given a huge boost to environmental protection. Justice Richard Humphreys lambasted An Bord Pleanála (ABP) for being more concerned about the visual impacts of wind farms than complying with EU law or addressing the climate emergency. Section 15 of the Climate Act demands that public bodies must act… Read more »

PRESIDENTIAL GERRYMANDER

Date: January 23, 2025 -

On June 6 last year several hundred Poles voted at four venues in the north – Belfast, Ballymena, Omagh and Newry – for candidates in the European parliament elections in Poland. Other EU citizens also voted in consulates and community centres. Across the border thousands of people were voting for Irish MEPs. Irish citizens in… Read more »

SINN FÉIN’S NEW SENATOR

Date: January 23, 2025 -

SINN FÉIN’S decision to transfer its northern economy minister to the Seanad has provoked much curious comment but little of the usual media conspiratorial analysis about two or three men making decisions in a back room in Belfast. That may be because the crushing logic of replacing the disgraced Niall Ó Donnghaile as party leader… Read more »

FLIGHT OF THE WILD GREENS

Date: January 23, 2025 -

THE LAST Green standing, party leader Roderic O’Gorman, recently slid his stiletto with surgical precision into both his party chair, ex-senator Pauline O’Reilly, and ex-junior agriculture minister Pippa Hackett (his vanquished leadership rival), telling the Irish Independent that both of them were stepping away from the party. This was based on personal statements from both… Read more »

REINVENTING VARADKAR

Date: January 23, 2025 -

IS LEO VARADKAR trying to reinvent himself as a retired western statesman turned champion of the oppressed in the manner of late US president Jimmy Carter? Hard core Young Fine Gael reactionaries who grew up with him back in the noughties were mourning the political demise of their former hero quite some time before he… Read more »

BIG PHIL’S LAMENT

Date: January 23, 2025 -

THE MOST original – contrarian even – critique of Michael Lowry’s central role in the creation of the new government came in the Sunday Independent from Mediahuis Ireland editor Fionnán Sheahan, whose article on the controversy positively dripped with sarcasm. Fionnán wrote an analysis of the first opinion poll of 2025, which covers all the… Read more »

TIMES SUBVERSIVES?

Date: January 23, 2025 -

HAS THE Irish Times editor’s office been infiltrated by those Sinn Féin subversives? Last week the comparison was uncanny between the newspaper’s editorial outpourings on the new programme for government and the more predictable onslaught from SF senior front-bench figures. On January 15 the opening paragraph of SF health spokesperson Dave Cullinane’s statement said the… Read more »

FOREIGN SPIES IN IRELAND

Date: January 23, 2025 -

ANOTHER CORKER from Sunday Times security correspondent John Mooney recently told of the “United Front Work Department (UFWD), a shadowy Chinese agency” that has “cultivated connections across Ireland”. UFWD activities, the story went, include the recruitment of people doing sensitive research, spying and intimidation of dissidents. This information has come to MI5’s favourite Irish newspaper… Read more »

NIALL GUNNE’S BUS CORRIDOR

Date: January 23, 2025 -

ONE OF the juicier-looking properties to arrive on the market is a large house on Rathgar’s leafy Highfield Road, which got a glowing review in the Business Post at the weekend. The seller here is looking for no less than €3.95m and he turns out to be a chap who knows a thing or two… Read more »

ARCHIVES COUNCIL IN STORAGE

Date: January 23, 2025 -

JUST OVER a year on from a leak, which started on the top floor of the National Archives premises on Bishop Street in D8, a number of changes have been introduced by director Orlaith McBride et al. Obviously, however, the National Archives Advisory Council (NAAC) had no input whatsoever. While the leak could have proved… Read more »

GATHERING FEEDBACK

Date: January 23, 2025 -

LAST MONTH Jessica Drum’s Screen Guilds of Ireland (SGI) – an association of technicians’ guilds in film and TV – announced it would be “gathering feedback” from personnel in all film and TV production departments, with an online survey launched two weeks ago. The SGI is chaired by former Anglo Irish banker Peter Fitzgerald, who… Read more »

HUSBANDS’ CUSTOMERS

Date: January 23, 2025 -

LEOPARDSTOWN BOSS Tim Husbands and his team have decided it’s time to “improve customer experience” by making the 2025 Dublin Racing Festival (DRF) a pre-booked, ticket-only event. Certainly, the track could do with a good result next month. The thinking behind the Leopardstown move is that the executive can anticipate the volume of attendance and,… Read more »

LONDONOFFICECALLIN FLIES HIGH

Date: January 23, 2025 -

HIGH-FLYING racehorse Londonofficecallin – a 23-times-raced maiden when leaving Evanna McCutcheon’s yard – won his seventh race from a dozen starts at Punchestown’s opening meeting of 2025 for his new owners, the In Bounds Syndicate. Winning for the second time in three starts for trainer Gavin Cromwell, the grey gelding had been successful five times… Read more »

HAYES BACK ON TRACK

Date: January 23, 2025 -

FOLLOWING HIS 15-month suspension for failing to take proper care of a horse, Patrick Joseph Hayes has trained his first winner since being re-issued with a training licence by the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB). Hayes’s licence had been suspended by the regulatory body following his conviction in Naas Circuit Court for animal neglect after… Read more »

UNDERVALUED TULLOW OIL NEEDS NEW ENERGY

Date: January 23, 2025 -

The International Chamber of Commerce announced on January 2 that Tullow Oil is not liable to pay the $320m branch profit remittance tax (BPRT), which the Ghanaian government was seeking to levy, on the grounds that BPRT falls outside the tax regime provided for in the petroleum agreements. This is obviously good news for Tullow… Read more »

BOTSWANA DIAMONDS FAILING TO SPARKLE

Date: January 23, 2025 -

There are three main areas for diamonds in the world – southern Africa, Canada and the Karelian Craton in Finland and Northern Russia – and Irish-connected companies have a presence in all three. The largest of these is the Dermot Desmond-linked Mountain Province Diamonds in the northern territories in Canada. The second is Karelian Diamonds,… Read more »

VISUAL’S QUARE OLD LOSSES

Date: January 23, 2025 -

HAVING JUST celebrated 15 years in operation, the well-funded Visual arts centre in Carlow – the largest visual arts space in the country – has started off 2025 with a pretty minimal offering to tempt in the arty-farty brigade, but presumably the coffers did get a boost before Christmas from Freezin’ – The Quare Cold… Read more »

DAVID STONE’S POP FLOP

Date: January 23, 2025 -

ANOTHER SETBACK for hapless businessman David Stone, whose efforts to rescue one of his many companies has just fallen flat. For many, it is not Stone’s eclectic mix of investments that would be recognised but rather the headlines he made in 2023 as a result of his conviction for allowing the euthanasia drug pentobarbital to… Read more »