Kevin Myers

Thursday

Kevin Myers

The Edition: are white working class boys being left behind?

From our UK edition

38 min listen

White working class boys consistently perform worse than other demographics in the UK's education system - why? (00:45) What is it like to be 'cancelled'? (14:20) And is it time to return to the office? (24:50)With the IEA's Christopher Snowdon; former Ucas head Mary Curnock Cook; journalist Kevin Myers; the Spectator's columnist Lionel Shriver; editor of the Oldie, Harry Mount; and Director of UK in a Changing Europe Anand Menon.Presented by Cindy Yu.Produced by Cindy Yu and Max Jeffery.

Kevin Myers

Welcome to the world you created, J.K. Rowling

From our UK edition

Why does the most important writer in English, J.K. Rowling, haunt the sewers of the Twittersphere? Why try to deal with the many complexities of transgenderism in a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without its Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm? Indeed, Twitter prizes a quite different Victorian moral order, namely that of Jack the Ripper, as the baying muezzins of social media hourly pronounce the end of someone’s reputation in the merciless perpetuity of the internet. This time three years ago, I was a well-known journalist in Ireland, with a modest profile in Britain.

Saturday

Kevin Myers

Eire of sorrows

From our UK edition

It doesn’t matter who wins the Irish elections – the country will remain an outpost of Brussels Dublin There is something tragically irrelevant about the elections taking place this weekend in Ireland. In recent months, Ireland has felt less like a country and more like the first acquisition of the Reborn Frankish Empire, after the Central European Bank and the IMF in effect took over day-to-day management of Irish affairs. The effect of this is to so reduce the significance of the general election that it’s more like appointing the staff of a small post office, in which the Taoiseach is actually just a shop steward negotiating tea breaks. The incoming Irish government will be merely administering the country as a satrapy of Brussels and the European Bank.

Saturday

Kevin Myers

Going south

From our UK edition

The moral nadir of any state must surely have come when Mr Gerry Adams MP announces that he is its white knight. Yes, this IRA butcher and architect of countless bombings and killings is abandoning Northern Ireland politics, and even his empty seat in Westminster, to stand in Ireland’s general election next year. He actually thinks that he is entitled to berate the politicians of the Irish Republic for their conduct. And by God, he could well have a point. Just look at the latest nugget to emerge from the parliamentary sewer that is Leinster House — the equivalent of the Palace of Westminster.

Saturday

Kevin Myers

Irishmen of myth

From our UK edition

If stupidity is defined by the inability to connect an oft-repeated policy with the failure that it always produces, then Irish republicanism is easily the stupidest political movement in Europe. The claim of Irish republicanism is that it unites Catholic, Protestant and dissenter under the common title, Irishman. This is mountebank bluster. In fact, Irish republicanism usually unites people under the common title, corpse. Brendan Hughes truly personified this bloodthirsty idiocy. He was a major player in the IRA campaign from 1970-1996, and his is the most important voice heard in Voices from the Grave, in which the journalist Ed Moloney has sewn together the tapes of interviews recorded with Hughes and with the loyalist terrorist leader David Irvine.

Saturday

Kevin Myers

Not all priests are paedophiles

From our UK edition

The nightmare of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues. Last month a US law firm, Manly & Maguire, ann- ounced it was suing the Irish diocese that trained the busy paedophile priest Oliver O’Grady. This worthy is now at the centre of at least 17 multi-million-dollar child-abuse lawsuits in the Californian diocese of Stockton. Worse is to come. Another 18 Irish priests are facing multiple-abuse charges in California alone, with law firms hustling for their share of the action against the Irish dioceses from which they came. Lawyers in many states across the US where Irish priests sowed their paedophiliac oats, turning Catholic children into unwilling catamites, are now eagerly watching the Manly & Maguire case, meanwhile sizing up juicy Church assets in Ireland.