Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole

Contributor

Fintan O’Toole is a writer and author. His books include We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is a winner of the European Press Prize and the Orwell Prize. He is also professor of Irish letters at Princeton University.

The really nauseating thing about the Ryder Cup is how seamlessly it will all happen

Imagine the war cabinet that would have been assembled if paediatric spinal surgery was a global spectator sport

The presidential election needs a candidate I wouldn’t vote for: Maria Steen

There are still a lot of orthodox Irish Catholics and people of other faiths who share their views on issues like abortion, homosexuality, gender and marriage

Ireland was once the tradwife capital of the world. Worse, they were happy

Or so they said. But surrendering to oppression can be a form of contentment

The pain and shame that Bertie Ahern caused this country are not forgotten

Does Fianna Fáil really want to nominate him for the Áras and deliver us a sharp reminder of what that felt like?

Sinn Féin may reject commemorating the Normans, but there are some suspiciously Saxon names in its ranks

Take a look at centuries of Irish revolutionaries and you’ll find links to Norman history

We in Ireland forget how recently we were the ‘crap-job’ migrants

If we were serious about stopping people coming here to work in low-paid jobs, we would have to be willing to do three things

Gaza is also a war on the human instinct for compassion

When we learn to shut down pity, we summon the pitiless to power

Ireland in the 1980s was bloody awful, but there was at least one good reason not to emigrate

Galway’s Druid theatre company had a superb, stubborn belief that a basket case of a nation could also be a Moses basket

Magic coins fill the coffers of paranormal Ireland

State coffers beefed up by huge corporation tax takes, but Government knows it can’t rely on money tree to live forever

Tuam is a microcosm for Ireland’s history of discarded bones

The excavation that began on the site of the mother and baby home yesterday is making history in a double sense

Ireland has a proud history of opposing anti-Semitism

Outrage at the collective torture of Gaza is linked to our historical opposition to oppression

I have had more wives than Henry VIII. It’s news to me too

Artificial intelligence has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction, so it has to spew out absurd ‘factoids’ instead

Nuclear weapons have been in the Middle East for decades – not in Iran, but in Israel

Israel successfully created a reality distortion field in which the possible (Iran might get nuclear weapons) obscures the actual (Israel already has them)

Official documents are quietly disappearing from departmental websites. Why?

The range of departments engaged in this alarming disappearing act suggests it is not accidental

At a time when the boom is even boomer, this statistic should mortify us

The stark fact is that there are students sitting Junior and Leaving Cert exams today who went to bed hungry last night

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE...

Common Ground

How does a post-Brexit world shape the identity and relationship of these islands