Articles

Have you ever gone to a gig so ridiculously funny that you can’t actually communicate with the person beside you? You are reduced to grimacing; words just can’t come out, tears and snorts, yes, but words, no. When I finally pulled myself together at Tommy Tiernan’s latest show in Vicar Street, it struck me that…

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…

It’s the day of the Easter Bunny – the ancient sign of fertility – and “breeding like rabbits” is exactly what we are up to. Traditionally, fertility is celebrated around the spring equinox and, given the fecundity of rabbits, they became a symbol of fertility and of Easter. The census, which came out last week,…

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…

Have you noticed how expensive petrol is these days? It now costs over €100 to fill up an average family car. In Ussher’s Quay the other day, there was a tailback of cars because a petrol station decided to offer a cut-price deal on petrol. Why is the price of fuel going up? Lots of…

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…

Could the China that Enda Kenny is visiting this week enter a recession in the next year or two? Yes, a recession, not a gradual slowdown, but a recession. This might seem a preposterous suggestion, given what we know has happened in the past ten years. But that is precisely the point. The recent past…

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…

The US stock market hit another post-crash high on Friday and it got me thinking not of America but of Japan – one of America’s giant creditors. As the US stock market has been rallying, the Japanese yen has been collapsing. Why might this be? This time last year, Japan was struck by a tsunami,…

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…