Ireland

If Geert Hofstede’s name is familiar to you, it might be from pop-science articles explaining a spate of Korean airliner crashes in the 1990s. A widely held theory placed some of the blame on the hierarchical nature of Korean culture; this made the junior pilot reluctant to mention any mistakes made by his superior. If he noticed the captain heading for a hillside, he might summon up the courage to mutter, ‘Perhaps, honoured sir, you might like to pay particular attention to the interesting terrain.’ This contrasts with low ‘power distance’ cultures: New Zealand, say, or Ireland. On Aer Lingus, a stewardess could jab the pilot in the ribs and

From ‘Colonel Winston Churchill’, The Spectator, 13 May 1916: The return of Colonel Churchill to the House of Commons, which we are told is to be permanent, has set going a number of rumours as to the future of the most audacious and brilliant figure in our public life. Colonel Churchill, it is alleged, is to come back into the Cabinet, and to come back as Irish Secretary… What is wanted in the Ministry just now is a man who can he trusted. But who dare say that Colonel Churchill has the quality of political trustworthiness? Be his political genius what it may, he is above all things a mauvais coucheur.

Here in Dublin, Ireland is busy marking 100 years since the Easter Rising of 1916. It is being celebrated, but with far less chest-beating and bombast than met the 50th anniversary in 1966.  And this is a good thing entirely. The Rising lasted for six days.  Its leaders seized key buildings around Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic.  It started a series of events that led to an independent Irish state in the south, but also to the partition of Ireland and a bloody civil war which claimed between two and three thousand lives. Emblematic of this year’s commemoration was an event on Good Friday, at a Unitarian church on St

I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that I think about them at all, I think that they are an ephemeral by-product of those creepy ‘virtual worlds’ in which obsessed gamers eventually go mad; that only such lost souls could seriously believe unregulated online money might eventually supplant the state-backed real thing; and that fashionable belief in them can only lead to fraud and loss. In short, I concluded some time ago, they are probably the work of Satan. ‘Every normal person above the age of six and not over-affected by chemical stimulants should [grasp] that societal concepts

‘No matter what I’m writing,’ says Colm Tóibín, ‘someone ends up getting abandoned. Or someone goes. No matter what I’m trying to do it comes in.’ It’s a reflection, he says, of his own consciousness. It makes ‘its way into everything’. If Tóibín is on close terms with the ache of loss, few writers have put it to such elegant use. He is in the midst of a period of roaring success: we are sitting in a hotel in Soho, talking about the new film of his 2009 novel Brooklyn, which has the lure and pain of leaving Ireland and family at its heart. Its heroine is Eilis Lacey, a