Ireland

I’m not* one to mock the Irish armed forces and there’s no gainsaying the fact that Irish troops have done their bit in various peacekeeping operations around the world. But (you guessed there’d be a “but”, right?) it’s hard impossible not to be amused by the fact that Irish troops preparing for deployment to Chad have been told they cannot play football soccer on the dusty playing fields of Chad: Defence Minister Willie O’Dea said the decision was made for health and safety reasons. “The reality in Chad is that the ground is extremely hard. Some of the sports are played out on open ground and when people fall, it

There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell’s Weekly Standard piece on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus: This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been–explicitly and officially–a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity… De Valera’s Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn’t matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may

Eammon Forde doesn’t much care for St Patrick’s Day: It says everything about what it means to be Irish these days that the biggest parades take place hundreds of miles from Irish soil where a once-proud diaspora’s celebration of its past has been hijacked by anyone who has seen The Quiet Man and wants to get noisily bladdered. They may as well wear their heart on their sleeves and pay a gaggle of pale-faced colleens with pigs under their arms to spray the streets with whiskey and potatoes.In Alan Partridge’s phrase, “de big oidea” behind St Patrick’s Day today is to amplify every cultural cliché to the point where it

The Long Hall: photo by Flickr user inaki_naiz. Used under a Creative Commons License. An important article in the New York Times on the decline of the traditional Irish pub. This is a serious matter and one that merits pondering. If there’s any upside to present economic difficulty it lies in the hope – faint but real – that it may do in property developers and hucksters before it gets the rest of us. That is, that it may reduce the number of once-great pubs vandalised by ill-considered refits designed to attract a wealthier class of punter. The sort that drinks wine. And cocktails. Temple Bar in Dublin was once

Hugh Leonard has died. His Telegraph obituary reeks of boozy afternoons in Dublin’s finest hostelries: Indeed, Leonard relished quarrels. “An Irish literary movement,” he used to say, “is when two playwrights are on speaking terms”… Leonard resented what he saw as his exclusion from the Irish arts world, and poured vitriol on lesser performers. The trouble with Ireland, he said, was that it was “a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent”. His critics were equally forthright about the Leonard ego. He was, said one, not an original playwright, merely “an adapter always in search of a plug”. Leonard retorted in kind. He eagerly debunked other famous names,

Tough times on the Emerald Isle: Dell is closing it’s largest non-US manufacturing plant. This is not good news. Established in Ireland in 1990, Dell employed more than 4,500 staff in Ireland at its height and is the country’s biggest exporter and second largest company. It accounts for approximately 5 per cent of Irish GDP and last year contributed €140m to the south western economy in wages alone. Who’s next? UPDATE: Should have realised this myself, but as Tim Worstall says, these figures seem very fishy. Not the number of jobs, the other ones. 5% of GDP? Hmmm. Anyway, it still ain’t good news and, given how much Ireland has

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s death, at 91, comes as a jolt. By the end, the Cruiser was something of a reactionary (his hostility to nationalism had led him to embrace Bob Macartney’s UK Unionist Party) but that shouldn’t detract from his achievements as a historian (especially his books on Parnell and Burke), journalist and public intellectual. Most of all, however, his death reminds one of how completely Ireland has changed in the past 20 years. The Cruiser’s battles with Charlie Haughey (he was right about Haughey years before the full extent of the former Taoiseach’s crookedness became widely apparent) and his fulminations on the national question have a certain antiquated feel