This is the oped, as filed, in the 13 July 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday. The things I didn’t have space to get into in this column include thoughts on a slight gender split that will be a caveat, but it doesn’t affect the main point: the difference between conditions in Ireland and the rest [...]

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Boy meets phone. Boy loses phone through third party interference, miscommunication and misunderstanding. Boy wins phone back with help from commenter on blog.
A happy ending. Until the sequel.
It’s Mamma Mia!* crossed with WALL-E.
Took Herself to this last night as a — gift, penance, masochistic act? — and I laughed in spite of myself several [...]

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Front page comment from the Sunday Independent on the economy (13 July 2008):
“We are, it’s true, caught in the economic cataclysm that has hit the developed world, but this dreadful cycle will, in time, come to an end, though nobody can say when…
The onset of the recession was, however, eminently predictable. Mr Cowen and [...]

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We never thought we’d live to see the day. iPhone porn from former boycott-the-iPhone advocate, Cork’s telecoms entrepreneur supremo Pat Phelan.
The caress of the box. The pauses - oh, the pauses. The tender, delicate removal of each layer of wrapping.
Wow.

Sphere: Related Content

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Well - I never thought I’d say this but I was glad to see someone defend Irish banks yesterday. Because John Hurley of the Central Bank did so without the usual lashing out that generally accompanies such statements - the wild, defensive, emotional lashing out being the things that (far more than any analyst report [...]

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This is something that I’d been wondering about. What, exactly, was in the Lisbon Treaty that so changed Ireland’s constitutional status quo that it required a referendum? Ruth Barrington wonders in today’s Irish Times:

Although the conventional wisdom holds that a referendum is required to ratify all EU treaties in Ireland, this is not the case. [...]

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Really interesting essay by Roy Clark on the overrepresentation of Irishness American journalism, occasioned by the death of Tim Russert.
There are more than a few bits to criticise - like lumping in Peggy Noonan with a bunch of mindless thugs, which was just thoughtless and unfair. And it just illuminates the space where there [...]

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Mick Fealty in a sharp and poignant post on the acquittals in the trial related to the Robert McCartney murder and their macro implications in the North. It should be chilling reading for the sensible wing of Sinn Fein and anybody who thinks they are a vehicle for a united Ireland:

From the beginning, the peace [...]

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The number of voters who say, according to Pat Leahy in the Sunday Business Post, that they were canvassed by the Yes campaign. The news here, perhaps generously left downstory by Leahy so as not to embarass contacts, is that the vaunted GOTV efforts of the main parties failed because the local organisations just didn’t [...]

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David Cameron has done it again. New Labour last night had one of the worst by-election results in history. Boris Johnson’s London mayoralty left an open seat in deep-blue Oxfordshire, and Labour wasn’t expected to do better than third in losing the contest in Henley. But coming in FIFTH, behind the British National Party? Labour [...]

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