The Leap Takers
Stubbornness and resistance under pressure became Hume’s and Trimble’s common strengths in withstanding attacks from inside and outside their respective political camps.
-
-
What’s up, Doc?
Leo Varadkar was a paradox, the quintessential Tory Boy who oversaw massive increases in welfare spending. His sudden, unexpected departure from politics adds to his enigma.
-
Both Sides Now
These Divided Isles: Britain and Ireland, Past and Future, by Philip Stephens, Faber & Faber, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0571381470 Philip Stephens’s These Divided Isles is bookended by what surely represents the high watermark of modern Anglo-Irish relations: Queen Elizabeth II’s 2011 state visit to Dublin. The event was widely hailed as symbolic of the…
-
Uncanny Valley
One of the strangest things about our current moment is the seemingly abrupt right turn of the tech industry in support of the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. This is especially unsettling for Irish people, long used to being the affable middleman between a welcoming America and a more culturally inscrutable Europe. Those of us who…
-
From Romance to Regret
The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, by Mateo Jarquin, The University of North Carolina Press, 336 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 978-1469678498 Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War, by Eline Van Ommen, University of California Press, 312 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0520390768 Sandinistas: A Moral History, by Robert J Sierakowski, University…
-
It’s My Party
On the wall near my home in Berlin, someone has sprayed a thoughtful observation: ‘Machen ist wie wollen, nur krasser’ – Doing is like wanting, just crazier. That could be the new political motto of Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most polarising politician of the left. Wagenknecht entered politics in 1990 and now, at fifty-five, is German…
-
Myths About Migration
This year an unprecedented number of elections are taking place around the world. At or near the top of the agenda in many of them is immigration. Hardly any other issue has a more polarising impact. Fear, suspicion and ignorance fill the spaces around it. Xenophobic falsehoods are being widely disseminated. The arrival in Europe…
-
Attack, attack, attack
During his tenure as president, Donald Trump used his office to grant executive clemency to more than 200 individuals charged or convicted of federal criminal offences. That may seem like a lot, but it is fewer than many of his predecessors: Bill Clinton, for example, pardoned more than twice that number. However, Trump’s use of…
-
Literary / Capital: Dublin
At St Stephen’s Green in 2024, sandwich-snatching seagulls, mangled-footed pigeons, office workers and the growing numbers of Dublin’s tented population comingle on a weekday lunchtime. The twenty-seven-acre park was originally built in 1680 on the outskirts of a city that was, according to a 1635 city assembly, ‘groweing very populous’. The opening of Grafton Street…
-
Beyond Defiance
A People Under Siege: The Unionists of Northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond, by Aaron Edwards, Merrion Press, 360 pp, €19.99, ISBN: 978-1785372995 The Ghost Limb: Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798, by Claire Mitchell, Beyond the Pale Books, 256 pp, £15, ISBN: 978-1914318191 As the social and political ground shifts in…
