Independent.ie - Kevin Myers RSS Feed

Kevin Myers: Toyota didn't suddenly start connecting the foot brake pedal to the engine accelerator

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

EVERY schoolboy could, once upon a time, solemnly reassure you that Catherine the Great of Russia died in the connubial embrace of her Great Dane, with whom or which -- I am unsure of the grammar of such relationships -- she was sexually besotted.

Kevin Myers: Ireland was a strange and demented place in 1975

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

A cast of virginal clerics wielded enormous power, with little resistance from the political classes

Kevin Myers: Physical bravery is a trait of true warriors -- but only moral courage can bring about peace

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

IF you read the kind of stuff that I read, you sometimes get strange dreams. And so I woke the other morning before dawn, convinced that I was a Luftwaffe pilot trying to land my Wilde Sau Focke-Wulf Fw190 in the middle of the night. Yes, I know that much of what follows will be a mystery to those few readers still with me: but what matter!

Kevin Myers: Don't believe the hjype or the Nördic negativity, my trijp to IKEA was an affär to remember

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Ikea is not The Beatles and Elvis Presley together, live on stage. Ikea is not George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer performing a sex act in public.

Kevin Myers: What the English have, as they showed last Saturday, is guts. But it is often witless guts

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

ALWAYS willing to oblige my two readers; one of them asked me what the rugby match at Twickenham showed about the English. No doubt the request was tongue-in-cheek, but either way, let me oblige.

Kevin Myers: We do not have a settled identity for our anthem

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

AT this time of year, I usually reach for my annual national-anthem column, dust it down, put a new crease down its front, pat its bottom, and send it on its way.

Kevin Myers: As for writing on rugby, you don't have to be a carpenter to see that the chair keeps falling over

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

IT was kind -- but really unnecessary -- for Ronan O'Gara and his cohorts of admirers to provide further evidence proving the point that I was making last week: that irrationalism and dysfunctionalism are unusually powerful influences in Irish life.

Kevin Myers: We do not behave like a sovereign republic. We exert almost no control over entry to the State

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

IT was good of the Israelis not to supply all of their team of assassins in Dubai with Irish passports, though the temptation must have been enormous.

Kevin Myers: An Bord Pleanala's nonsensical philosophy is a recipe for poverty

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

SO yes, following An Bord Pleanala proposals that the Corrib pipeline should best be laid in the expectation of an explosion, we should henceforth always prepare for the worst.

Kevin Myers: Lee's betrayal shows us Fine Gael is not fit to lead

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

It has been a sobering week. The man who looked me in the eye at a public conversation in UCD two months ago, who said he could not unsew what he had sewn, and that RTE was a receding shore to which he would never return, has unsewn. It is the sea that now recedes.

Kevin Myers: For the love of God, and his blessed disciple St Patrick, displace me from this wretched isle

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Mbwana minister! All hail from the Emerald Isle, on this, its patron saint's feast day! It is my 10th year here! Any chance of granting me the posting that I sought after my very first week?

Kevin Myers: Feminist animosity and appetite for victimhood have utterly confused the criminal code on rape

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Rape -- as a subject -- is almost beyond useful discussion. Whatever exchanges occur are formulaic and predictable, and involve the usual authorised quangos and semi-quangos, all of them feminist and agenda-driven.

Kevin Myers: A constitutional declaration that we adore children is meaningless blather

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

'Keane emerges as preferred candidate for HSE chief executive,' said the headline. Well, why not? Robbie Keane has had what football-writers call a chequered career, so why should he not take over the Haiti that is our health service?

Kevin Myers: There is no Fianna Fail plot to save the banks -- for the left to pretend otherwise is infantile

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

NO, I'm like you, I can't make head or tail of most of what's going on and I leave Brendan Keenan to explain the subtleties. But it is utterly misleading for so many other commentators to describe the Government's attempts to stabilise our banking system as a ready-up between Fianna Fail and some vastly powerful commercial interests.

Kevin Myers: It is as if the authors of Israeli policy are using an unpublished Ludlum plot to chart state policy

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

'I like Jews, it's Israelis I can't stand," is a common enough sentiment amongst Irish people who have probably never met an Israeli in their lives. This is the one great bien-pensant bigotry that may dare speak its name in Irish life. Can you imagine that kind of witless sentiment about any other group being tolerated in polite society? Yet not merely is knee-jerk anti-Israeliness a norm in Irish life, it is a passport into "acceptable" society. If you sneer at Israel and Israelis, you must therefore be politically sound. I am reluctant to call this anti-Semitism, because it is a grossly over-used term; yet what other word suffices? No other people will adduce the visceral denunciations that the name Israel instantly achieves.

Kevin Myers: There's nothing remotely Olympian about hurtling head-first down a track at 90mph on a tea-tray

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

You might be aware that something called the 'Winter Olympics' is on at the moment. It consists of human activities you have never heard of, now being called 'sports', that are not merely elevated into an international competition, but are awarded with real Olympic gold medals.

Kevin Myers: We're creating a racial rod for our own back by failing to act now on integration in schools

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I know that some four long weeks have elapsed since the Dail resumed after the TDs' month-long break for Christmas, so the poor dears are probably exhausted, fixing planning permissions and so on. Oops, sorry, not planning permissions: we no longer have any building projects to seek permission for. Indeed, we barely have an economy these days.

Kevin Myers: It's an Irish characteristic. We are comfortable with failure. It's a familiar condition and it suits us.

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Sneering is one of the occupational hazards of journalism. It is also one of the most inexcusable. For no one ever sneered without intending to amuse some by hurting others. Which was no doubt what, sub- consciously, I had in mind in 1992, when writing what is called a 'colour story' about the Ireland-Wales game.

Kevin Myers: I would entrust the teaching of my son to the 'Jesuits' of an almost Jesuitless Clongowes

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I wake up each morning in the madhouse that is Ireland and wonder, what next? What insanity will the banks, or the political classes, or the liberal mob concoct today? I'm never disappointed.

Kevin Myers: Failure is actually what independent Ireland has always done best. We even failed at prosperity

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

THE Taoiseach's recent 1916 speech, and the warm reception the references to the "heroes" of the GPO got from the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, were depressingly illuminating.