Fintan O'Toole

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

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

We have a windfall – but the golden apples seem to have fallen on our heads. Our governing culture has lost its great get-out clause: ‘If only we had the money…'

My comedic, commercial fiction has been described as ‘fluffy’ or ‘an easy read’ more times than my heart and ego can take

Hey, kids – we have a roadmap. Just hang on in there and try not to get too angry and ashamed about being poor in a rich country

Plus, what the writer said in conversation with Fintan O’Toole in the National Concert Hall on Saturday

Somehow we can only feel pain of abused and abandoned children in safe retrospect, when it is brought to light after decades underground

The central, compelling argument is that public space is a vital but sorely neglected component of a functioning democracy

We called the predatory paedophile in my school Little Plum. We all learned early the required habits of toxic silence

The bus to Belfast for cataract surgery is a brilliant bit of political entrepreneurship, but it clouds the reality that healthcare is a right and we, the public, pay for all these treatments

The Democrats have generated an equal and opposite reaction to their own culpable inertia, a unity of purpose that makes them much more like the Republicans. It’s not always pretty to watch

The 1968 convention was the last hurrah for a phenomenon of huge importance in our own history: the Irish-American political machine. How apt that this week’s convention will mark the reluctant end of the career of Joe Biden

The eejits who get caught have been hooked by algorithms engineered by social media companies

The immigration policies of all political parties warrant scrutiny

Ireland has become far better at creating jobs, and like every other place where there are work opportunities, it attracts people who want to make a better life for themselves

No one in Government has put forward any justification for hollowing out RTÉ. But, in an age when trusted information has never been more vital to the defence of democracy, that is what it is doing

To watch a good man, a remarkably effective president and a courageous battler against adversity reduced to such frailty was unbearable

Protofascist ideas are at least as prevalent in Ireland as in other Western democracies and the reactionary, nativist mindset is well established here. All the movement is lacking is a leader

That Trump became a victim of the very violence he has done so much to validate will not provoke either him or his fans to think again. It will merely serve to fortify a mindset in which America is already at war with itself

To put it crudely, a big part of the appeal of Brexit was scale. It felt like a very big thing to do, just as, later in 2016, electing a celebrity non-politician to the White House felt big