We’re heading for the second biggest fiscal disaster in the history of the State
The idea that the Green Party was making us all go too far too fast is the exact opposite of the truth
‘Spit on me Dickie!’ scandalised the Church. But Rock was more safety valve than satanic threat
There were soon much more exotic ways to be a teenager than going into violent hysterics for Dickie Rock, but for a time, he filled the gap between who Irish teenagers were and who they were supposed to be
Fintan O’Toole on his career: ‘You had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you’
The Irish Times columnist has made a new documentary about his life for RTÉ. Here he looks back on a career that he began as the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex
Irish voters keep doing the same things and expecting different results
The State is entering a holding pattern, circling a future somewhere between high anxiety and extraordinary opportunity
Ireland may soon be expelled naked from the fiscal Garden of Eden
State’s short-term future is shaped simultaneously by wild optimism and existential anxiety
The three transparent election lies even politicians can’t pretend to believe
The extremely self-conscious uncoupling of the two centre-right parties is so obviously an act, it’s like a game of cards in which the stakes are matchsticks. But Sinn Féin isn’t much better
The Routledge History of Irish America: A vast and comprehensive study of all aspects of the Irish-American experience
Vigorous and critically minded history proves that the shifting and sometimes contradictory ‘social construct’ of Irish America cannot be reduced to one singular identity
We have entered a no man’s land, an age of dizzying transitions
The far right has been much better than the left at giving voters the illusion that it has an accurate map across these liminal spaces
An unhappy Ireland prepares for a general election
The expansion of the State is no longer a lefty position in Irish politics. It is pretty much everybody’s position
Donald Trump’s openly authoritarian instincts are about to be unleashed
It is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think 'this too will pass'
What has happened to the cowboys who built defective apartments? Absolutely nothing
No prosecutions, no financial costs, no names and damn all shame
Trump 2.0 would be fascism tempered by senility
Fintan O’Toole: Fintan O’Toole: US voters have had had ample warning as the former president has set out his intentions quite explicitly
Sinn Féin responds to child abuse more or less as the Catholic hierarchy did
Dress Cardinal McDonald and her bishops in episcopal robes and it’s a movie we’ve all seen before
Fintan O’Toole: Politicians are in a long-distance relationship with the consequences of their decisions
Take Ireland’s top manufacturer of insulation - not Kingspan, but the HSE. It creates layers of impenetrable padding between political decision-makers and the consequences
I take no pleasure in saying that Hamas is winning
Israel is putting all its eggs in Donald Trump’s grubby basket, banking on an alliance with a man whose friendship tends to be more toxic than his enmity