Media
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I A new dawn in the last of Europe’s Habsburg-like messy conglomerates, the kind of thing that used to be called an Empire but is now reduced to a mere Kingdom. A cold new dawn it is, as Macdara will report. A few things have happened. The Conservative collapse was not at all as dramatic…
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It is not a necessary condition of writing about opera that it attempt to match the melodramatic heights of the operatic experience in its language. But tacky and stupid people would disagree, and unfortunately many of them have jobs that not only involve writing about opera, but in fact involve writing about opera on behalf…
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Time seems to have sped up, and there is so much to process that this writer more practised in ancient grudge is once again working away in the glare of the news-screen. In recent days we have seen, of course, the continuing genocide in Palestine committed by extremists robed in the gentility that settler colonists…
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As the Liberal Right continues to promote the Extreme Right in Respectable circles—looking for a local Führer to help them sell more papers and gain more viewers or votes—we find that the killing has started. Josip Štrok and David Družinec were attacked in Clondalkin by extremists on 30 March. Štrok, who was 31 years old,…
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I Like anyone in the Late Capitalist world, particularly that part of it stuck in the English language, this epistolarian has some ability to opine on the Present State of the United States. That he prefers not to do so is a proper reaction to that common situation whereby Irish people speak about the USA…
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We witnessed in 2016 a commemoration of the Easter Rising and the Proclamation of the Republic; other terms were used, certain old wars being continued into the Present with words in place of arms. An extraordinary poster in a prominent site in Dublin commemorated four people for the occasion, Henry Grattan, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart…
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We can expect, as the polling for His Majesty’s Glorious Union carries on sinking to a level beyond which even a few Irish Times readers might notice that the word majority can no longer be comfortably applied, that Partitionists will develop an interest in alternative means of gauging the strength of the Eternal Union. If…
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A young man from Birmingham presents a podcast about Conspiracy and Racism in his city. There is a little too much about the young man included, for Macdara’s tastes; the present writer has less appetite for impulsive twenty-something Brummies than Serial’s American producers do. But Hamza Syed is certainly likeable, and on the right side;…
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With this, your correspondent introduces a new category: Ancient Grudge, whereby he complains about something from the past that has pissed him off enough that he has had to write about it to get it out of his system. Macdara has long been fascinated by the functioning of groups, and in particular the tendency of…
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The comedy of choice for the Partitionist elite is a niche publication known as the Irish Times. This outlet has courageously been describing ever smaller numbers as a majority when it comes to the issue of the Occupation. We should not expect it to be deterred by its own recent daring in describing the 50%…