Ireland

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

I may have to revise my view that crypto-currencies are Satan’s work

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

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Colm Tóibín on priests, loss and the half-said thing

‘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

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The ‘Stakeknife’ investigation and the dark reality of double agents

The decision by Barra McGrory, the Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland, to recommend an official investigation into the activities of Freddie Scappaticci – the alleged IRA enforcer and British agent known as ‘Stakeknife’ – seems likely to unearth some of the most painful, long-buried secrets of the ‘dirty war’ in Northern Ireland. In so doing it will raise difficult questions about the permissible limits of state intelligence-gathering which remain highly relevant today. Scappaticci, who denied being a British agent before departing Northern Ireland in 2003, is nonetheless widely reported to have been a longstanding head of the IRA’s ‘nutting squad’, or internal security unit, which was responsible for

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Here’s what happens when you create a ‘safe space’ at a pro-life event

You know all that stuff about ‘safe spaces’, places on university campuses where you’re not allowed to say or do anything mean or that could possibly be construed as mean about anyone in case it hurts people’s feelings, especially if you’re a minority of some description? Well, I got the chance to try it out myself the other day. I was at a gathering in Dublin of pro-lifers – I’d been asked to be one of the speakers at their annual event – and it was all going well. There had been a nice young woman talking about hostels for single mothers. There was also a professor of law from

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Europe’s ever-looser union

Europhiles have warned us for years of the dangers of Britain leaving the EU. But all the while a different spectre has crept up on their other flank: which is that even if the UK votes to stay in the EU in 2017, we might be one of the only countries left. It’s a radical thought, but if they’d like to consider it, the Europhiles should look at what is happening across the continent. Pro-EU countries are proving harder and harder to find. The eastern European countries may still be financial net receivers, but they are now having to weigh up their honey pot against the demands that come with

Thursday

Claire Lowdon

A karaoke version of Kafka

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people have ‘learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself’. Godley, presumably, is not the real-life economist Wynne Godley but the fictional mathematician Adam Godley of Banville’s The Infinities (2009), whose discoveries supplant relativity and quantum physics. So, the world of The Blue Guitar is a version of steampunk, straight

Thursday

Ross Carey

Dublin

What a delight it is to toy with a wooden newspaper-holder rather than a smartphone, tucked away in the cosy corner by the tall sunlit windows of a Victorian hotel. My companion sips her Baileys coffee, while I hide behind my broadsheet earwigging as a novelist is interviewed — possibly for the newspaper I’m reading. Dublin is still sponsored by Guinness and after I’ve drunk a second pint in the charming Library Bar of the Central Hotel, we head across to the great bookshop Hodges Figgis. En route, we pass Davy Byrnes, where you can still get a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of wine as Leopold Bloom did in 1904.

Thursday

Prue Leith

Diary – 6 August 2015

My Cambodian daughter and her husband have just got married again. Wedding One was a Buddhist affair in our drawing room, complete with monks, temple dancer, gold umbrellas, brass gongs, three changes of costume and a lot of delicious Cambodian food. That was family only, so this time she had the works: the full meringue, 200 guests, village church (she sees no conflict between Buddhism and Christianity), marquee, fireworks. Time was when wedding guests were the parents’ chums and the bride and groom went off as soon as the cake was cut and the bouquet thrown. Now the parents’ friends don’t get a look in. Not on day two either,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How Jeremy Corbyn could boost David Cameron’s majority

Tories tend to think that Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader will be fabulously useful for their party, returning them an even bigger majority in 2020 and pitching his own party into such turmoil that it struggles to work as an effective Opposition. But one benefit of his leadership to the existing Tory majority has been overlooked, which is the effect it would have on the Democratic Unionist Party. Sources in the DUP point out to me that given Corbyn’s friendship with Sinn Fein, they would be unable to work with Labour to exert pressure on the Conservatives in key votes. This may mean that the eight DUP MPs are more likely

Friday

Charles Moore

Euclid’s theorem of the Irish

The excellently named Euclid Tsakalotos has become the Greek finance minister after the sacking (tsaking?) of Varoufakis. He was educated at St Paul’s in the 1970s, and went on to Oxford. This atrocious suffering made him, even at the time, a supporter of Irish republicanism. In March this year, he popped up at a Sinn Fein conference and began his speech by apologising for his English accent, adding that ‘in mitigating circumstances, I am married to a Celt’. Euclid’s theorem is that the Irish are ‘honorary southerners’, now forming an arc of leftist insurrection which runs from Dublin, through Podemos in Spain, to Athens. Given the horrors inflicted on these

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 9 July 2015

The case for Daesh Sir: For once the admirable Rod Liddle has got it completely wrong (‘You can’t take the Islam out of Islamic State’, 4 July). We absolutely shouldn’t call the homoerotic, narcissistic death cult ‘Islamic State’ — not because it offends ordinary Muslims, nor because it has nothing to do with Islam (it has everything to do with Islam) but because it legitimises and validates the preposterous project. The media has a responsibility not to run terrorist propaganda unchallenged. Politicians, including the Prime Minister, are starting to wise up to this and should be applauded for doing so. We are in an information war with our enemies. Let

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 25 June 2015

Free trade with Africa Sir: Nicholas Farrell suggests that a naval blockade is the only solution to Italy’s immigration crisis (‘The invasion of Italy’, 20 June). Examining the causes of the situation might identify other measures. Since the European Union effectively closed its borders to trade with Africa to protect European farmers from lower food prices, the agricultural economies of most African countries have been in decline. Of course there is another reason for Africa’s decline. About 60 years ago, the Europeans found it convenient to convince themselves that in Africa self-government was better than good government. It followed that aid would be a convenient substitute for the risks or

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Irish Catholicism’s response to gay marriage hasn’t been totally incoherent

Matthew Parris, in a characteristically elegant essay in this week’s magazine, complains about the rubbish quality of the arguments against gay marriage in the wake of the Irish Referendum; so very different from the kind of intellectually coherent Christian discourse that we used to get from the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge, C.S. Lewis et al. He’s got a point, though he is being a little unfair in identifying as the personification of intellectual shallowness Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin. His remarks on RTE, Irish television, after the referendum did not, admittedly, show him in a particularly good light. When he said that the church in Ireland needed to undertake

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is gay marriage just a fad?

Now that Ireland has voted Yes to same-sex marriage, it will be widely believed that this trend is unstoppable and those who oppose it will end up looking like people who supported the slave trade. It is possible. But in fact history has many examples of admired ideas which look like the future for a bit and then run out of steam — high-rise housing, nationalisation, asbestos, Esperanto, communism. The obsession with gay rights and identity, and especially with homosexual marriage, seems to be characteristic of societies with low birth rates and declining global importance. Rising societies with growing populations see marriage as the key to the future of humanity, so

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 May 2015

Amnesty International and others have placed a large newspaper advertisement telling Michael Gove ‘Don’t Scrap Our Human Rights’. The ad asserts that ‘A government cannot give human rights or take them away’, which, if true, makes one wonder how it can scrap them. Human rights are philosophically a confused idea; but their political power consists in the fact that anyone questioning them can be made to look nasty. People who love making new laws — particularly new laws that cost money — therefore like to present these laws as human rights. Article 29 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, for example, says ‘Everyone has the right of access to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 May 2015

Home A Bill to enable a referendum on whether voters wanted Britain to ‘remain’ in the European Union figured in the Queen’s Speech. Another Bill prohibited any rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020. Tenants of housing associations would be given the right to buy their homes. Provision for Scottish devolution was promised in fulfilment of the recommendations of the cross-party Smith Commission. A ‘powerhouse’ in the north was to come into being through cities being given powers over housing, transport, planning and policing. Laws on strikes would be tightened. Red tape for business would be reduced, and a new quango set up to invigilate late

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

As a gay atheist, I want to see the church oppose same-sex marriage

I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature. Moses had come down from Mount Sinai bringing God’s commandments written on two tablets of stone. ‘And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot…

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Gay marriage will split the Catholic Church

Ireland, for so long the most overtly Catholic state in Western Europe, has voted for gay marriage by a stupendous margin – 62 per cent. Never before has a country legalised the practice by popular vote. It would be naive to ask: how could this happen? Hatred of the Church is one of the central features of modern Ireland, thanks not only to the paedophile scandals but also to the joyless quasi-Jansenist character of the Irish Church, which was handed complete control of education in the Free State after partition in 1922. (Many of its priests were outstandingly holy and charitable, but you’ll get your head bitten off if you suggest that in today’s

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Ireland’s gay marriage vote was never an equal contest

In more ways than one it’s impossible to be heard above the din right now in the wake of the Yes vote in Ireland on gay marriage. There’s a special noise that goes with an orgy of self-congratulation, a roar of mutual approbation, and it drowned everything else out in Dublin as the results came in today. Like rugby, only more triumphalist. Actually, I was watching the scene from the Sky studio in Millbank, where my interlocutor in central Dublin, Patrick Strudwick, a journalist and activist, was appearing on a screen on the streets and had to shout over the crowd to make himself heard, to repeat, over and over

Wednesday

Ed West

The free market is still the greatest force for reducing prejudice

I suppose if you’d told someone in Northern Ireland 25 years ago that the most contentious issue come May 2015 would be a gay cake they would have taken that future. If you’d gone back another 300 years and told John Locke he might not be so pleased, however, to find that his principle of conscience had been so abused by the people who claimed to follow his philosophy. The Ashers refused to bake a cake that proclaimed a message in support of same-sex marriage, which they do not support, and therefore have been found to have discriminated. Yet no one would object to a baker who refused to bake a