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Dan O'Brien Opinion Decency and moderation will see Ireland through the turbulent times lying ahead

Over seven years writing in these pages, so much has changed – for Ireland and the world.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion The many questions that need answers as Sinn Féin edges closer to government

What is the biggest question facing this island in the times to come? That is the appropriate issue to discuss in this, my final column in these pages.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion With Brexit looming, here's the real reason you need to revisit your usual shopping list

Let's start with some practical advice for readers on Brexit. Barriers to trade in the Irish Sea are now likely to go up overnight in just 10 weeks. That is because the talks between the EU and Britain are not going well.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Ireland must take all the help it can get to survive in a turbulent world

This is my penultimate column for the Sunday Independent. After writing for the paper for seven years, often on international affairs, it is an appropriate time to draw some threads together on how Ireland can navigate its way in the world during the turbulent times ahead.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Budget is different to the bank bailout - most of our economy has been thrown a life vest

Unprecedented. Much like the year in which we live, the Government's Budget for next year is unprecedented.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion While we catastrophise about Covid, we ignore risk of running out of cash

We Irish view the world in an increasingly strange and unhealthy way. We catastrophise about Covid in a way other European countries do not. We focus on how bad the effects of the virus could get, on how many more restrictions might be imposed by Government and how helpless we are in the face of the virus.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Ireland is doing all right - it's time we finally stopped losing the plot about Covid

Most people have access to Euronews, the Europe-wide TV news channel. Have you watched it lately? If you haven't, you should. It is not only horizon-broadening, it provides a welcome break from Covid coverage.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Ireland at risk from almost every direction as global tensions grow

The pandemic and its consequences may be getting all the attention - but there is an awful lot else happening in the world right now. Much of what's happening will have consequences for the people of this island. Most of those consequences will not be good.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion As Budget Day approaches, there is both good news and bad - but it's mostly bad

Are you inclined to receiving good news before bad news? Or do you prefer it the other way around? When giving presentations on the economic outlook, your columnist always asks the organisers of conferences and events this question. In normal times, the preference varies. These days, everyone wants the bad news upfront before hearing reasons to be hopeful.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion We need less dramatics, more action in the battle with Covid

The coming week will see global deaths from Covid-19 reach one million. This is a tragedy. Along with death, the pandemic has brought illness, fear and uncertainty. It has also caused the misery of mass unemployment and the loss of businesses in which people have invested their lives.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion We will not return to Covid's darkest days - but Government's plan still lacks clarity

Could we be heading back to the dark days of the pandemic? Some medical experts believe it is possible that coronavirus could kill as many, if not more, people than in the spring. Other experts disagree.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion It's not nostalgia for the empire that drove Boris, it's fear of EU dominion

The world has regularly paid too much attention to stupid but insignificant things Donald Trump has said or done.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Ireland's Covid job losses among EU's worst - so where do we go from here?

The fog of war can blind soldiers to what is going on around them. The fog of the coronavirus makes it hard to understand what's happening to our world.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Don't be fooled: Covid has made us all poorer - and there's a bill to pay, too

The coming week marks six months since the first Covid death in Ireland. In early March, and over subsequent weeks, the world went into a justifiable panic. A new and unknown disease was spreading rapidly around the globe. Hospitals were filling up fast. Most alarmingly, people were dying in greater numbers with each passing day. It was very far from clear how bad things could get.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion You may have lost interest in Brexit but its impact could be devastating for all of us

Britain formally left the European Union at the end of January, just before the pandemic struck. If you think you might have missed the consequences of that historic exit because of coronavirus, you'd be wrong.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion It is vital new EU commissioner is supportive of free trade

Only two jobs in the European Commission have global clout: one is the job Phil Hogan has just vacated; the other is the role Margrethe Vestager plays as Europe's competition enforcer.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Forget deference, our whole legal system is crying out for greater scrutiny and reform

The past week has highlighted two things: those in one branch of Government are treated differently from those in the other branches; and Ireland's system of litigation is an iniquitous lottery. Neither reflects well on the State's judiciary.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Rising population will help us to bounce back

This year will forever be associated with the pandemic, and the deaths it has caused. It may be somewhat ironic, but it is also likely to be the year that the population of the 26 counties passes five million for the first time since Famine days.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion We're all in this together? Ditch the cliché and appeal to people's self-interest instead

There is enormous uncertainty around how the Government will and should respond to the many challenges the Covid-19 pandemic poses to society. Much of this is inevitable. We are living through a protracted emergency of a kind nobody alive has lived through.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Scale of economic collapse is becoming horrifyingly clear

There is much to be downbeat about in 2020. Hearing medical experts still arguing about the efficacy of face masks in slowing the spread of Covid-19 is just one of many reasons to feel glum. That is just what happened last week at a Dáil Covid committee meeting, when a disagreement broke out between two medics on what the evidence says about masks.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion We can't hide from virus forever - those of us at low risk need to get back to work

How to live with Covid-19 will remain the central question in everyone's life for the foreseeable future. As such, it is vital that we are aware of the risks we face. Let's begin with two facts from the State's official figures on the disease.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion John Hume's island of inclusiveness has yet to be achieved

John Hume's death, coming just after the passing of his fellow SDLP titan Seamus Mallon earlier in 2020, closes a chapter. The two men were this island's outstanding democrats and statesmen of their own era. It is by no means a stretch to say that they were the finest public representatives of the entire post-partition era, or indeed of any era.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Our hospitality and retail sectors are in shock - but just how bad could things get?

Is the hospitality industry set to become the equivalent of the construction industry during the property crash? After Tuesday's announcement that another step towards reopening is to be paused, that question is more pertinent than ever. We will return to it presently.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion We need better system of advisers, and more of them, to run a modern state

Governing is not easy. Even in the best of times, running modern states is a vast and complex endeavour. The range of things governments do in developed countries such as Ireland continues to expand, despite fact-free claims by some of a 'neoliberal' plot to downsize the state.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Fewer deaths and our determination to keep spending shine light at end of Covid tunnel

Is there light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel? In ­Ireland and across Europe the numbers of new Covid cases in recent days and weeks remain at a fraction of those recorded last March and April. There have been fresh outbreaks in some places across the continent, but only a handful of places have come close to recording the numbers of cases of last spring. This is despite an end to lockdown and a cautious re-opening across the ­continent. So far so good, by and large.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion The challenge of the great unknowns in the pandemic and the political mood

'Dublin's way or Frankfurt's way'. These were the fighting words of the man who was about to become Tanaiste - Eamon Gilmore - in the depths of the last economic fiasco in early 2011. The man who is now Tanaiste, Leo Varadkar, said around the same time while he was still in opposition that not another 'red cent' of taxpayers' money would go to propping up companies, in that case banks.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion More eyes on Bundoran than Benidorm as tourists face up to departure from the norm

Two days ago Dublin should have hosted a last-16 match in soccer's Euro 2020 finals. Fans thronging the capital would have added to the usual high-season influx of tourists, making the city a riot of colour and revelry. Pubs would have been packed, pints would have flowed and hotel rooms would have been impossible to find.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion Why now is the right time to reopen

The half-way point of 2020 is at hand. It is a good time to take stock of a year which nobody will forget in a hurry and one which will reverberate for a long time to come.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion New Cold War will be chilling for Ireland - whether Trump or Biden is in White House

Donald Trump is a polarising figure. No US president since records began has had such consistently high approval ratings among his own party's supporters - the latest Gallup survey shows 85pc of Republicans give him the thumbs-up. Among Democrats, his approval rating in the same poll was just 5pc.

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Dan O'Brien Opinion The true seat of power is now in Brussels

Diplomacy has been making front pages in recent days. Last Wednesday night, Ireland was elected to a two-year term on the United Nations Security Council, winning almost as many votes as Norway and significantly more than Canada.