Until we see someone in government joining the dots, it is highly likely 2026 will feel like a slightly more asphyxiated ...

In 1992, I moved into a flat on Parliament Street in Dublin city centre. Back then, the four residents of the refurbished 18th-century building were the only people living on the street. Yes, you read ...

From a macroeconomic perspective, maybe for the first time ever, the major problem in Ireland is a supply side problem: demand is surging, but supply is not responding. It is not a case of deficient ...

Half Julius Caesar, half Mattress Mick, Donald Trump has just declared economic war on the rest of the world, but what exactly did he say? Whisper it quietly, but in Ireland, given how bad things ...

Kamala Harris’s father, Donald Harris, an eminent economics professor at prestigious Stanford University in California, was described by the Stanford Daily in 1976 as “a Marxist scholar . . . too ...

This week Fox News, that bastion of truth, claimed that violent crime in Dublin is surging. Armed with a ‘statistic’ that murders and assaults were up 114 per cent, the American broadcaster reported ...

Not that many people know that The Wizard of Oz, one of America’s most-loved films, is based on the arcane economic world of monetary policy. L Frank Baum’s novel is a disguised critique of the folly ...

In the 1998 movie The Horse Whisperer, Robert Redford is a man with a special ability to communicate with horses and, using a combination of emotional intelligence and body language, put them at ease, ...

Now that the election is out of the way, it’s time to get serious about housing. Ireland needs a major housing reset and this will discommode many. It has to. Otherwise there will never be real social ...

In terms of a small inner city neighbourhood there can be few potentially prettier places than Shandon on the north side of Cork city. A patchwork of steep, small streets and lanes, with buildings ...

What a week to be thinking about the world and geopolitics! I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not clear whether you, me or anyone else can stomach 3½ more years of this carry on. Recently this ...

One of the joys of writing a weekly column is the unusual tributaries explored, often sparked by real-world events. Today I’ve been watching old clips of The Godfather, in particular Marlon Brando’s ...