Irish Independent

What we are seeing now is the breakdown of conventional wisdom in Europe. With respect to the Euro, conventional wisdom is a strange and stubborn commodity. Normally it is technocrats who are at the vanguard of conventional wisdom. Theses technocrats don’t have to work in the public service. They can hide in dynamic companies for…

Thirty-one years ago this week the great Bob Marley passed away and ascended to the great Rasta heaven in the sky. For most of us, Marley was reggae and reggae was Marley. I remember the day he played in Dalymount in the summer of 1980. What I actually remember most (I was too young to…

Yesterday was International Workers’ Day. It was celebrated all over Europe with public holidays. It is a bit ironic that on the day that Europeans celebrate our workers so many millions of these workers are on the dole. Traditionally, periods of high unemployment are also periods of social and political change. It is easy to…

Financially, Spain is like Ireland but it is much, much bigger. There is little doubt that Spain will need a massive bailout. The question is, who has the money to bail out Europe’s fourth-largest economy, and when Spain topples what happens to Italy and what happens to the euro? The European response to the fact…

This weekend, friends from Uruguay visited. For Guillermo O’Neill and his wife Alessandra Lawlor, the trip was a sort of homecoming. They are part of the great Irish Tribe down in Latin America. Their great grandparents left here — from Navan — at the turn of the 20th Century and they have kept their Irish…

Did you ever have a teacher who was compassionate to his or her students? Did you have a teacher who took so much interest in individual pupils that they’d take the time to worry about whether the student was good enough for honours or pass papers? This was done with the welfare of the pupil…

Ernest Hemingway was once asked how did he go bankrupt. The great man thought for a second and then replied: “I went bankrupt in two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” When we see the figures coming from the various banks, it is not difficult to see that something similar is happening in Ireland. Whether the…

On the dot of 11, Mr Justice Peter Kelly swooped up to his stoop, horn rims on the tip of his nose, the wig symmetrically aligned on his head. He was the first one I saw yesterday morning at the Four Courts whose wig wasn’t slightly askew. Maybe the askew wig is an affectation, a…

Last year 76,300 people emigrated from our country. This is an average of 209 emigrating every day. Nine people left every hour. One person left every seven minutes. The people who are leaving are young, and well-educated. In the last great scattering of the Irish in the late-1980s, we know that a university graduate was…

Few indicators could have underscored the inconsistency at the heart of the eurozone than figures yesterday showing Germany’s investor confidence at a 21-month high, while Spain, wracked by 22pc unemployment, gives the EU the two fingers on the fiscal compact. Here we have Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, cruising ahead and bathed in lots of free…