Public affairs and political communications consultant. Speech-writer. Former Irish Govt Adviser (2004-10). Occasional columnist and commentator: Broadsheet.ie, RTÉ.
For the first time in almost six years I am writing a weekly opinion piece which will not appear on Broadsheet.ie. Though I have written for various print magazines and newspapers over the years, writing a weekly opinion piece for Broadsheet was both enjoyable and slightly.
The Broadsheet platform offered me the potential to reach a different audience than when I was writing for the Evening Herald. An audience that might not instinctively identify with my more moderate brand of politics. To judge from the comments on my Broadsheet farewell piece the exercise kind of worked. Many people leaving messages along the lines of “while I didn’t often agree with you, I enjoyed reading your point of view and seeing your analysis.”
I am deeply sorry that Broadsheet is gone. We will miss its eclectic assortment of quirky and whimsical stories, doggie/cat pics, news items, and early sight of the next day’s front pages. We will be the poorer for its demise It served its readers… and its contributors… well.
I am grateful to John – who I have known from the days of In Dublin and Magill – and to all the team behind Broadsheet. I wish them all well for the future.
The fact that I no longer have the Broadsheet platform from which to rant, won’t stop me foisting my weekly analysis on an unprepared and unguarded public, though they may have to search a little harder to find me – be it on my website, podcast and/or Social Media… starting now.
Orson Welles as Harry Lime – Switzerland had 500 years of brotherly love and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
In this column, which first appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday May 30th, I ask why our city – Dublin – is slowly, but progressively, falling apart. This is a follow-up, to previous pieces on street crime and housing and says that the chronic shortage of labour due to people being unable to live in the city due to the soaring cost of living here is grinding life here to a standstill.
Dublin Airport CEO spotted at the Oireachtas Transport Committee on Wed June 1st.
This week’s column will be mercifully short. Not because I have deliberately set out to write a short one, but because this is all that is left over this morning after I deleted all the expletives and libelous references to Dublin Airport senior management, I angrily included last night.
The other reason it is short is because today’s offering is effectively a follow-up, to last week’s effort as I am again writing how the cost of living in Dublin is slowly grinding life here to a standstill. Indeed both this piece and last week’s are themselves follow-ons from a previous column on the level of street crime in our city centre.
This column appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday, May 23rd 2022, and sees me return to a point I have made many times over the past few years, namely the urgent need for a government response on housing that addressing the crisis on the scale required. This government’s “Housing For All” strategy is a dramatic improvement on the near inertia of the previous 6+ years under Fine Gael, but it is still not on the scale or timeframe required to convince the public that this crisis will be over soon. And… to make things worse… inflation, rising interest rates and building cost increases will make a tough task tougher.
Just over a week ago Iarnród Éireann announced that it was no longer able to provide catering services on its Intercity network. With the exception of some Dublin/Belfast Enterprise trains, passengers will not be able to buy a cup of tea/coffee accompanied by a stale Kit-Kat or a half-filled sandwich.
Yes, we will miss the fun of seeing what items the catering service had managed not to pack on to those wobbly aluminum trolleys which dispensed hot water with all the force of a 56-year-old man with a swollen prostate… but as problems facing this country go, this isn’t a big one.
The problem has nothing to do with the complexities of providing a cup of tea on a train and – according to the catering contractor, Rail Gourmet – has all to do with the real difficulties it is having in finding staff to push the trolleys up and down the train. Rail Gourmet says the problem is so acute that it cannot resolve it, and so Irish Rail must now organise a tender competition so it can hopefully restore this fairly basic service sometime in 2023.
This column first appeared on May 9th 2022 on Broadsheet and looks at the Northern Ireland assembly election results and how the two governments in Dublin and London have responded.
For about forty years, from the early 1930s up to the early 1970s, many weighty academic tomes on Karl Marx and on Charles Darwin, attempted to analysis how and why Marx decided to ask the father of the Theory of Evolution if he would accept Marx dedicating one of the volumes of Das Kapital, to him – and why Darwin politely, but firmly, declined the request?
It was a conundrum which intrigued and perplexed many fine scholars from both the left and right. Each side offering complex and multi-layered interpretations about each man’s motivations.
Was Marx just seeking Darwin’s approval – it is certain that Marx admired Darwin’s work – or was he attempting to draw parallels between his and Darwin’s theories and perhaps win the great man over to his arguments? Was Darwin’s refusal driven by a deep wariness of Marx’s politics and the fear of being associated with them.
This column first appeared on Broadsheet on Monday April 25th and looks at the problem of random vicious attacks and anti-social behaviour in Dublin city centre. It is an issue which Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan and John Lahart both raised this issue in the Dáil on Wednesday night
Though the Dáil has not been in session since April 7, when it comes to political process stories the past three weeks have been far from uneventful.
There was the scuppering of Dr Tony Holohan’s Trinity College secondment; a saga which will to run and run as Deputy John McGuinness’s Finance Committee attempts to uncover who agreed what with whom… even if he must do it without the cooperation of the Secretary General at the Department of Health or his Ministerial sidekick.
The column first appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday April 4th. Though the DUP’s support is faltering and has been on a steady decline over the past few years, it is still too early to write the party’s political obituary. It may run Sinn Féin close in the race to emerge as the single biggest party. The DUP decline in the polls, past the Robinson era, is due to internal faction fights that are based partly on personality, but primarily due to the inability of a sizeable cohort in the party to grasp the fact that Northern Ireland has changed over the past decade or more, despite the DUP’s political preeminence, and is continuing to change.
L-R Jonathan Buckley (DUP), Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, Loyalist activist Jamie Bryson – during an anti NI Protocol rally in Lurgan
With the Northern Ireland Assembly election exactly one month away, a great deal of the commentary has focused – naturally enough – on the damage that unionism continues to inflict on itself.
I cannot recall a time when unionism seemed in greater disarray. All due to the ill-judged decisions and actions of hard line, irridentist unionists.
This is not to deny that there is a strong and growing seam of moderate, indeed progressive, unionism. A modern unionism that is more focused on facing the challenges of the future than re-waging the tribal battles of the past. A unionism that sees the grave dangers in the rallies against the Northern Protocol being foisted on many small towns across the six counties.
This column first appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday March 28th and sees me return to one of my most frequent themes… the devastation inflicted on Ireland’s national defence by the decade of political indifference shown by the two Fine Gael-led governments since 2011.
97th Cadet Class Commissioning April 2022 via Defence Forces Flickr
“Coveney: Russian war highlights need to boost Defence Forces’ spend”.
This was the headline to a story in the Irish Examiner explaining how our part-time Minister for Defence is perhaps… possibly… on the cusp of the verge of being ready… in a few months… to signal that he just about ready to announce plans to consider the partial implementation of some of the recommendations in the final report of the Commission on Defence… if he secures the agreement of certain key people in Cabinet.
Regrettably, the words actually uttered by Minister Coveney on the day were not that much more definitive than my facetious parody, telling reporters that:
“I’ll be bringing an action plan on the back of the recommendations in the commission to Government in June and it will be a strong statement of intent from me, and I hope from government, if we can get approval, in terms of the need to quite significantly increase our investment in the Defence Forces”
It is a few weeks since I updated this page to include my most recent blogs. This one first appeared on Broadsheet on March 14th and looks at Sinn Féin’s recent industrial strength spring clean of its online archive of statements
“Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.”
This guidance for politicians comes from the late Mo Udall, a long serving Democratic Congressman from Arizona.
It’s an approach you would hope members of today’s Oireachtas, from all sides, might heed – but as we see during the daily set pieces of Leaders’ Questions and the Order of Business, they don’t.
Instead, rather than acknowledging that they might have been wrong and correcting the situation, they double down and insist that they didn’t say what we think they said. We get obduracy and petulance in place of debate and discussion. In the more extreme cases we get some parties going the whole hog and deleting almost anything and everything they have ever said. Continue reading “Why eat your words when you can delete them?”→
This column first appeared on Broadsheet on Monday February 28th
German chancellor Olaf Scholz announcing radical changes to German defence policy Pic via: bundeskanzler.de/
I start this week’s column, picking up from where I left off last week, by looking at the future prospects of the Russian Ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov.
Last Monday I suggested that he be sent home. I was not the first to say it. The call has echoed across most of Leinster House. At the end of last week we heard individual Labour and Fine Gael demand his expulsion. Inside Fianna Fáil, Jim O’Callaghan TD led a coordinated call by the party’s backbench TDs, MEPs, and Senators for the Ambassador to be expelled. Continue reading “How Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine undid two decades work in a few days… for no gain.”→
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