Liz Walsh is an Irish barrister, author, former award winning journalist and lecturer.
From our UK edition
When a government’s answer to protesting truckers is to send in the army, something has gone badly wrong. At present, truckers and farmers in Ireland are blocking roads around the country as part of a protest against the cripplingly high cost of fuel and the lack of government action to fix it. Sending in the
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There is a particular kind of weariness that settles over you when watching anti-West radical activists on tour. It is the predictability of watching chic revolutionaries attempting to cosplay as ‘resistance fighters’ or Che Guevara, while maintaining their strictly non-negotiable requirement for a good air con system, functioning minibar and high thread Egyptian cotton bed
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On St Patrick’s day later this month, Taoiseach Micheal Martin will meet Donald Trump in the Oval Office. It could not have come at a worse time, with the US-Israel military campaign against Iran escalating. As he presents Trump with the customary bowl of shamrock, the Irish leader will have one eye on the US
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A Palestinian flag is currently fluttering from the top of the Spire, Dublin’s tallest landmark, looking down on the Irish flag which flies from the historic General Post Office a few metres away. Pro-Palestinian fanatics dropped the flag – emblazoned with the words ‘Stop Genocide in Gaza’ – onto the Spire from a drone hovering
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The massacre of Jews on Bondi Beach was the tragic, yet inevitable, result of rising Jew hatred throughout the western world, including in Ireland. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, Yoni Weider, spoke of the festering anti-Semitism targeted at Ireland’s Jewish community, as the Taoiseach Micheál Martin and senior ministers fell over themselves to proclaim support for Irish Jews. Their support
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Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum shake-up has sent the Irish government into something approaching panic mode. The profound new measures, including penalties for those exploiting the system, a 20-year wait for settlement, and returning refugees if their native country is deemed safe, are deeply problematic for Ireland. The government correctly predicts a sharp surge in
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As predicted, the radical far-left has emerged victorious from Ireland’s farcical presidential election, leaving the ruling coalition parties humiliated and obliterated in a shambles of their own making. Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s 68-year-old answer to Jeremy Corbyn, will be Ireland’s next head of state. But large swathes of middle and rural Ireland who feel disenfranchised by
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Beer, Brits, and bad language are the few culturally accurate elements of the new Netflix series, House of Guinness. Loved by American and UK critics, hated by Irish critics, the series on the battle for control of the iconic Irish Guinness family brewery in 19th-Century revolutionary Ireland has sharply divided opinion. Are we Irish an over-sensitive
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The Irish presidential election was already an anti-democratic farce even before the combined left candidate lobbed an incendiary device into the mix. Catherine Connolly’s comments on BBC describing Hamas as ‘part of the fabric of Palestinian people’ – and her opinion that Keir Starmer is wrong to exclude Hamas from a new Palestinian state – has
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Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin is keeping a close eye on the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign, and he does not like what he sees. According to Martin, society must say no. ‘Watching what is happening in the UK, I don’t like it. We, so far, have resisted a lot of what has transpired in other societies,’ he
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In the end, it was a combination of the Irish weather, European maritime intelligence and engine trouble that scuppered a massive Hezbollah-cartel drugs shipment. The Irish government’s failure to patrol the coastline has made Ireland a safe harbour for the fast-evolving drug trafficking network merging terror and narco finance. It is a safe bet that
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You truly could not make it up. Kneecap, who spent the past three months whingeing and complaining about their gigs being cancelled because of their views on Gaza, have signed an open letter demanding a small community festival be shut down. All that guff about the sanctity of free speech and artistic expression. It was
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US diplomat Mike Huckabee was dead right to question whether Ireland had ‘fallen into a vat of Guinness.’ Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, played into stereotypical tropes on the Irish and alcohol when he made that comment last week. But it is, he reckoned, the only possible explanation for Ireland’s looming ban on
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If Ireland’s foreign affairs minister expected plaudits from EU leaders for the republic’s looming ban on Israeli settlement goods, he was sorely disappointed. Ireland, Simon Harris pontificated in Brussels, ‘is the only country in the entire European Union that has published any legislation ever in relation to banning trade with the occupied Palestinian territories, but
