Journalist, author, broadcaster
Whatever voters decide on the stability treaty, the figures don’t add up, the words won’t last long and it won’t help the eurozone crisis, writes Peter Geoghegan Few people have had such a major impact on recent Irish political life – and yet remain so unknown, inside and outside the country – as Richard Crotty. […]
On Wednesday afternoon, excerpts from a speech by the Irish finance minister Michael Noonan to the Bloomberg Ireland Economic Summit in Dublin, purportedly copied from the Irish Times website, appeared on PoliticalWorld.org. The contributor, PaddyJoe, accused the newspaper of removing a paragraph from an earlier version of the story, in which Noonan, speaking about the […]
A recently published survey of students should make sobering reading for Ireland’s politicians. The poll, conducted by international research firm Trendence, asked 6,000 students in Irish universities if they intend to leave the country after graduation to secure a job in their chosen field. 27 per cent answered ‘yes’. In comparison, just 19 per cent […]
It doesn’t feel like a country in the grip of a lost decade, writes Peter Geoghegan, but beyond Dublin’s corporate office blocks and crowded city-centre bars lies another Ireland Last weekend more than 50,000 people – many of them Scottish rugby fans – packed into the Aviva Stadium in Dublin to watch Ireland triumph over […]
Almost every sketch of Boris Johnson includes the same adjective: gaffe-prone. And with good reason – during his chequered political career, the current London mayor has variously accused the city of Liverpool of “wallowing” in its “victim status”, compared Tory party in-fighting to “Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing”, and described anti-capitalist Occupy […]
Every St Stephen’s Day I play soccer with a group of school friends in Longford, my hometown. It’s not a pretty sight – 22 over-fed men, their prime fast disappearing over the horizon, huffing and puffing on the local Gaelic pitch – but it’s been a tradition for well over a decade, and old traditions […]
LAST Saturday, Tyrone defeated Derry in the final of the McKenna Cup at the Athletic Grounds in Armagh. Among the sell-out crowd was an unlikely acolyte of Ulster GAA: Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson. While right-wing unionists decried the DUP leader’s first trip to a GAA match as treachery, Robinson appeared to enjoy the […]
My thoughts on what Scottish Independence campaign – and independence itself – might mean for Northern Ireland, from Scotsman January 11. ‘Do you want Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom?’ Doubtless it’s the kind of phrasing David Cameron had in mind when he demanded a ‘fair, clear and decisive question’ on Scottish independence […]
What Michael D’s victory in last week’s presidential election could – could – mean for Irish emigrants. From this week’s Irish Post. Last week, Michael D Higgins won by a landslide a vote for Ireland’s next president. Capturing 40 per cent of ballots cast, the Labour man comfortably topped the poll, with his nearest rival […]
This review of D.M. Leeson’s fascinating The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, September 2. The Black and Tans ‘have gone down in history as the British equivalent of the Turkish bashi-bazouks or the German Freikorps.’ A 10,000-strong police force scrambled from […]