The British and Irish governments have commenced another round of talks in the North. The governments protest that these talks are not for the optics. That they are serious. That real business is being done. And that they are trying to facilitate discussions between the Northern parties.
The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic. In 2000 and 2004, GOP gunslingers played into the Western myth and mined images of manliness, feminising Al Gore as a Beta Tree-Hugger, John Kerry as a Waffling War Wimp With a Hectoring Wife and John Edwards as his true bride, the Breck Girl.
The ugliness of the controversy about the Danish cartoons of Muhammad is not the most disturbing thing about it. The most disturbing thing, writes John Waters, is the willingness of Western society to capitulate in the face of threats, and in doing so to sell out one of its own most sacred values: the right of citizens to express freely their opinions.
Druid Synge runs some marathon theatre on the Aran Islands, chefs battle it out for the Masterchef crown and the Irish public's first foray into stocks and shares goes a bit wrong
When a taxi driver phoned the Irish Times in the middle of the night to report that the Stardust was on fire with lots of people inside, there was just one novice reporter on duty. She dropped everything and rushed to the scene. This is how successive editions of the paper reported the story throughout the night
Fresh from causing havoc on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC, Anjem Choudary – spokesman for al-Ghuraba, the group that mobilsed protesters in London who carried placards threatening suicide bombings and massacres in revenge for the Danish cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammad – appeared on The Eamon Dunphy Breakfast Show on Newstalk 106.
No one in the media, least of all Meejit, readily admits to purveying conventional wisdom. God forbid a columnist starts a screed by declaring that, if readers care to look beyond a few flashy flights of rhetoric and some trivial carping at big targets, and note instead the underlying assumptions, they'll find nothing substantial, new, different or challenging in what follows.
The newly-launched Irish Daily Mail is like a daily version of Hello! magazine, which means it will probably do well. B
I must say it's been a little strange this past month to find myself writing again after all these years for a publication in which "right-wing" is used without irony as a term of abuse. (Although I suspect I myself have been described as such in these columns from time to time, I don't feel any more comfortable answering to the description "right-wing' than I would anymore to "left-wing".) By "The Chorus" I mean, broadly, the media, but not simply that.
Media hysteria surrounded the trial of Wayne O'Donoghue, tried for the murder of Robert Holohan.