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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
In the go-getting age of the Celtic Tiger a drain clearance company sported a traffic-stopping slogan along the side of its van. “Your crap is our bread and butter,” it declared, as it tootled around Dublin’s mean streets. Though restrained compared to Donald Trump’s vomitous scatology about countries “kissing my ass” and sorting “their sh*t”, the plumber’s slogan encapsulates the essence of the current US trade belligerence against much of the rest of the world (excluding Russia, of course).
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2 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
A group of women with offspring of their own gathered in Dublin’s Kildare Street on Mother’s Day. They spanned the age spectrum from new mothers to grandmothers. Some were Palestinian, but most were Irish. They laid candles and pictures of massacred children on the ground in front of the gates of Leinster House. Upon each child’s picture, they placed a pair of small shoes and a flower.
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3 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
Dear Tipperary North voter,Greetings from a culchie in the capital. I’m writing this letter because you probably need cheering up. You must be feeling mortified at the bedlam created in the Dáil by your TD, Michael Lowry. The chat here is all about the vulgar eff-you gesture he made in the chamber on Tuesday and the gutless excuse that he was only beckoning Solidarity’s Paul Murphy.
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4 weeks ago | 
msn.com | Justine McCarthy
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Justine McCarthy
Middle Ireland feels grievously insulted by the US president. On St Patrick’s Day, when the globe traditionally turns green, Donald Trump’s official guest at the White House was not the taoiseach bearing a bowl of shamrock, but an unelected stooge recently found by a civil court jury liable for the rape of a woman in a Dublin hotel.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
It could have been – marginally – worse. Donald Trump could have invited the Kinahan gang to the Oval Office for St Patrick’s Day. The US president has a great grá for fugitives from the law. His first official guest at the White House was Binyamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza. He is also itching to meet Vladimir Putin, the subject of a global arrest warrant for war crimes in Ukraine, including the abduction of thousands of children.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
If men were harming and killing green tiger beetles at the rate they are attacking women, road construction would be halted, an Oireachtas committee would announce an investigation and readers would be writing incandescent letters to newspapers. When the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 was a public health pandemic, the world shut down. When the same organisation declared violence against women was a public health pandemic, the world kept going on its merry old way.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
Protocol guidelines for the visit of An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, to Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, at the White House next Wednesday. 1. Wear a suit. Your host is under the impression that clothes make a man. 2. Pair it with a tie so long a small child playing Tarzan could swing off it. 3. Pat the president’s knee, fondly. 4. Say: “Tell your beautiful wife I said hello”. 5. Do not ask where his beautiful wife is. 6. Say “thanks” in every sentence. Actually, shout it. 7.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
“Waste not, want not” was a diktat of many an Irish childhood. It came from the same rule book as “Eat your dinner – there are babies starving in Africa” and the obligation to wear older siblings’ hand-me-downs and “be grateful”. In lean times, frugality is a virtue. But when wealth comes in the door, thrift flies out the window. Ireland’s dash up the ladder of the world’s richest countries has coincided with its plunge down the greasy pole of public spending prudence.
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2 months ago | 
irishtimes.com | Justine McCarthy
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