Neil Leslie

1 month ago | irishmirror.ie | Neil Leslie

It was the room where much of it happened. Five years ago this week Leo Varadkar told us we needed to talk about coronavirus. And this makeshift briefing room in a squat office building on Dublin’s Baggot Street would become Ground Zero for a lot of that discussion. It became the stage from where the leading members of a previously unknown group within the Department of Health would hold a nightly address to the nation.

1 month ago | irishmirror.ie | Neil Leslie

It's been said that a movement of about a billion people would be needed to truly change the way the world works. To build a tipping point against the prevailing status quo of billionaires and the economic pyramid scheme of perpetual growth. To derail a model that allows the gilded few to keep extracting wealth and siphoning it into ever larger piles of money they cannot spend. The odds against building such a force seem insurmountable. A mission impossible.

2 months ago | irishmirror.ie | Neil Leslie

There’s a new sheriff in town. It was the childish but not unsurprising metaphor JD Vance used to announce that the world order has shifted. Uncle Sam has chosen a new side. Europe is out. The mafia state of Godfather, Vladimir Putin is in. And the cowboys are in charge. The Old West seems to be a recurring theme for the new Trumpworld. From his coronation speech which drew on the myth of the American frontier spirit. To his ultimatum to Hamas to get out of town by High Noon.

2 months ago | irishmirror.ie | Neil Leslie

In an average lifetime they say a person can come to recognise around 5,000 faces. If you are of a certain vintage from Dublin, Paddy Cullen’s was probably one of your first, outside of the people you shared a house and a street with. In an Ireland that had only just got colour TV, he was maybe the first celebrity in our small world. The first person you had never met who would go on to leave an imprint on your consciousness.

2 months ago | irishmirror.ie | Neil Leslie

Historian Ben Wilson has called them our greatest invention. A “miracle of human existence.”In his book ‘Metropolis’ he also noted the world’s cities can be a bit “beshitten” with the detritus of so many souls crammed together. Love them or loathe them, seven billion people will live in them by 2050. Like many a Dubliner I have toyed with what it might be like to decamp to rural Ireland for a change of pace and a slice of the good life.