The first full week of January is usually quiet for news. Not this year. It was a week, as Denis Staunton writes in his wide-ranging analysis, in which the United States attempted to take control of a sovereign state, humiliated Russia by seizing one of its oil tankers in the north Atlantic and terrified Europe by threatening to seize part of its territory.
Naturally, then, the attention of our reporters in Ireland, Europe, the Americas and Asia has focused this weekend on the fallout from the capture by the United States of Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela. Tom Hennigan, who writes for us from Latin America, speaks to residents living in and around Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas about their terrifying experience last weekend, when they found themselves at the epicentre of US forces’ assault on the biggest military base in the Venezuelan capital. Earlier in the week, Tom had a revealing profile of the woman backed by Donald Trump as Maduro’s successor.
The brazen attack on Venezuela has coincided with fresh threats from the Trump administration against Greenland, and European leaders are taking those threats seriously. Our correspondent Derek Scally travelled to Greenland this week and in his first dispatch from the capital, Nuuk, he finds anxiety and unease among a population who find themselves at the centre of a heated collision of history, geopolitics and national pride.
“The giant Arctic island may be larger than western Europe, but most of it is an uninhabited snowy tundra where about 20,000 people – a third of Greenland’s population – cluster in the capital,” Derek writes. “On a snowy grey Friday morning, it feels a small, lonely and vulnerable place. Particularly since Donald Trump, property developer turned US president, turned his attention back to what he views as prime real estate." Greenland is not for sale, insists our guest columnist Nina Jul Larsen, a journalist who was born and raised there.
READ MORE
Hers is one of several pieces of commentary we published this weekend on Trump’s upending of the international system. In Lara Marlowe’s view, Europe may have just 20 days to avert the irreparable. “The head-spinning events of the past week indicate that either Trump is stark raving mad or his elevation to the US presidency was the greatest undercover coup in the history of Soviet and Russian intelligence,” she writes. What is unfolding before our eyes, according to David McWilliams, is a geopolitical change that may well be as dramatic as the end of the Cold War.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin was in China this week, where he met President Xi Jinping and other senior figures in the Communist Party. As our leader column notes, he walked a diplomatic tightrope in Beijing, but his suggestion that the EU should work on its competitiveness rather than complain about Chinese imports might have carried more weight if it did not come at the same time as the Government voted against the EU trade deal with Mercosur.
Cliff Taylor gives a withering assessment of the Government’s vote against that south American trade agreement. Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris are well aware that Ireland will benefit from Mercosur more than it will lose, he suggests, but they are afraid to admit it because the beef farming lobby has dominated public debate on the issue and the two leaders fear that endorsing it would destabilise their coalition and jeopardise their chances in two coming byelections.
The repercussions from that vote - which Europe Correspondent Jack Power suggests will include a loss of influence in Brussels - are just one of many challenges facing Martin in the year ahead. Political Editor Pat Leahy looks ahead to the Taoiseach’s visit to the Oval Office for St Patrick’s Day. It’s still two months away, but after the “stratospheric” stress levels in Government Buildings that preceded the same event last year, the event is already occupying the minds of some of his advisers.
“As 2026 dawns,” Pat writes, “Martin’s position is not exactly precarious; but nor is it unambiguously secure.”
There’s a lot more to read across all sections of our site and app this morning. Some readers will recall Eddie Hobbs, a Cork man who emerged as a sort of celebrity financial adviser in the mid-2000s. Today, as Conor Gallagher writes in this profile, Hobbs promotes right-wing conspiracy theories on everything from world banking to climate change and Covid-19.
The strong Irish connection to Hamnet, the film adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, has reminded us of the strength of the Irish film-making scene. How did we find ourselves in this golden age of Irish cinema, asks Paul Colgan.
The other film that everyone is talking about this week is Saipan, the fictionalised account of the famous clash between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane on the eve of the 2002 World Cup. Our columnist Kevin Kilbane was in the room when McCarthy and Keane confronted one another, and, watching the film this week, he says, there wasn’t much that he recognised in its “cartoonish” portrayal of the incident.
I also enjoyed this column from Darragh Ó Sé on what the success of two rival GAA clubs in west Kerry - Dingle and An Ghaeltacht - means for a region defined by its scenery, its music, the Irish language and what Ó Sé calls “its wildness”.
Finally, our culture coverage this weekend is dominated by comprehensive previews of the year ahead in books (fiction and nonfiction), films, music and visual art.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
We value your views. Please feel free to send comments, feedback or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to feedback@irishtimes.com.
