Fintan O'Toole

The State is entering a holding pattern, circling a future somewhere between high anxiety and extraordinary opportunity

State’s short-term future is shaped simultaneously by wild optimism and existential anxiety

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

Vigorous and critically minded history proves that the shifting and sometimes contradictory ‘social construct’ of Irish America cannot be reduced to one singular identity

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

The expansion of the State is no longer a lefty position in Irish politics. It is pretty much everybody’s position

It is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think 'this too will pass'

No prosecutions, no financial costs, no names and damn all shame

Fintan O’Toole: Fintan O’Toole: US voters have had had ample warning as the former president has set out his intentions quite explicitly

Dress Cardinal McDonald and her bishops in episcopal robes and it’s a movie we’ve all seen before

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