Opinion

Monday 22 October 2018

Presidential candidate Peter Casey. Photo: PA

'Don't quit': amazing support has helped me to stay in race

Okay, I'm just going to say it: I've been troubled the past couple of days. To read articles that say I am a racist hurts. To hear the Taoiseach, whom I have always respected, say people shouldn't vote for me also hurts, deeply.

PRIVILEGE: ‘The most egregious of unsupported defamation is walked into our national press wrapped in the cloak of Dail privilege’.
Photo: Frank Mc Grath

Analysis

I was exonerated - but we must act to halt the avalanche of lies and vilification

Those who have their reputations wrongly destroyed in the avalanche of public opprobrium normally have no recourse.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE: Maurice McCabe and his wife Lorraine finally received some measure of justice. Photo: Tony Gavin

Analysis

Tusla is mired in failure yet allowed to go unchallenged

There were exhalations of 'finally' when Justice Charleton published his report last Thursday week, putting the final cuts and polishes to Ireland's answer to the Hope Diamond, Sergeant Maurice McCabe. It was a breathtaking report, forensic in its analysis, unsparing of 'official Ireland's' malice, gossip, incompetence,...

In our heart of hearts, we know this throwaway culture has to change. (Lynne Cameron/PA)

Comment

Eamon Ryan: Government must take the lead in ending plastic waste

We are sick and tired of plastic waste. All those bottles and cups littering our most scenic spots. Watching David Attenborough on Blue Planet II, we realise that this trash is polluting our waters, wildlife, and food chain.

GONE: Denis Naughten quit as Communications Minister. Photo: Gareth Chaney Collins

Comment

Oldtown proves superfast path to rural broadband is possible

Oldtown is a small village nestled into the fields beyond Swords where the horizon is dotted by the rhythm of planes floating in and out of Dublin Airport. A few weeks before the Great Blizzard of 1947, which held the country in the grips of an ice-bound siege for months on end, something truly remarkable happened there.

Declan Lynch

From a ridiculous debate to the sublime Van

It had been another carnival of eejitry, this presidential debate on RTE Radio One last Saturday lunchtime - but there was something different about this one. Or rather, there was something different at the end of it, something so different it might have been a kind of an experiment in altered states of consciousness.

CRISIS looms: Leo Varadkar and Theresa May at a bilateral meeting in Brussels last Wednesday when nothing was again agreed. Photo: Taoiseach Government/PA Wire

Colm McCarthy

A no-deal crash-out, a super-fudge or a political crisis are the only choices now

Since the European Union is such a thorough-going construct in economic integration, its external borders must be clear and unambiguous. There are no tariffs internally, no quotas, free circulation of goods, services, capital and labour, as well as a single system of regulation overseen by a common court.

SCREEN TEST: Each of us needs to feel special when sitting in front of a computer screen or iPad

Analysis

Intimacy faces crisis in the age of digital connectivity

The term connection has a wide variety of meanings. It can refer to a physical or logical path between two entities, it can refer to the flow over the path, it can inferentially refer to an action associated with the setting up of a path, or it can refer to an association between two or more entities, with or without regard to any path between them. In this paper,...

DISTURBINGLY RELEVANT READ: Anna Burns on stage at the Guildhall in London after she was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel ‘Milkman’. Photo: Frank Augstein/PA

Analysis

The past is not such a foreign country when it is brought back darkly to life

A photograph was needed to publicise my first novel, so I went to have it taken standing on waste ground in Belfast's nationalist Ardoyne district wearing a white Union Jack T shirt, purely for mischief.

CAB follow the assets to crack down on money laundering. Photo: Gareth Chaney / Collins

Comment

Gang crime now pays by using white collar tactics

John Fitzgerald was not your archetypal money launderer. He had no criminal past, he didn't have a drug habit and he didn't appear to have huge financial troubles either. He was a self-employed haulier from Tullow, Co Carlow, who drove his truck on and off the ferries at Irish ports on a weekly basis.