Archive for August, 2007

This weekend, many of the 40,000 people who will travel to Stradbally for the Electric Picnic probably still remember the thrill of getting your hands on a new vinyl album. Even for part-time, uncommitted musos, the new album with its cover, inside sleeve, lyrics and design was a prized procession to be treasured, shared with mates and above all, taped ferociously. A little later, the CD took over, but the buzz and the hype was almost the same.

As the Irish economy winds down, perhaps people will see merit in an often discarded party.

This week thousands of Irish teenagers will be accepting university places. For most, this will open an exciting phase in their lives when they will make life-long friends, learn a bit, have a laugh and begin the process of growing up. Government policy aims to send 80pc of our school leavers to some form of university or other. So this is an experience that more and more Irish school leavers will enjoy in the years ahead.

Our reliance on the property market is being cruelly exposed as the global financial crisis gathers pace.

It’s like discovering your husband downloads porn from the internet. You think you know someone and then, wham, reality hits.

What did they think the Belfast Agreement was about? What did you think the St Andrew’s Agreement was trying to engineer? Where politics leads, economics follows, and vice versa.

The chaos of the last few days in the financial markets is the upshot of making profits from lending money to people who cannot afford to pay it back.

The Irish plantation of the English countryside is in full swing. It is hard to know what Elizabeth the first – the instigator of the plantation of Ireland – would make of it.

Sarah feels awful dropping off her daughter every morning. The child’s only eight months old, but what can Sarah do? She’s in a trap. She works, but most of her cash goes on childcare.

In the past few days there has been a lot of commentary about collapse of share prices on the ISEQ index. Pages have been devoted to what it means for pensions, whether it is justified and what are the likely implications, if any, on the real world.