On Sunday, the Ross Lake House Hotel in Rosscahill was burned down. This was an act of callous and brutal savagery. The empty hotel was due to become a refuge to dozens of people who badly needed it. This was not an accident. It was a crime born in craven fear. It is one of… Read more »

Very few events during the Taoiseach’s present term will be as fundamentally happy as the safe return of Emily Hand to her family. The Tánaiste’s statement went basically unnoticed. Indeed, the Taoiseach’s full statement has also mostly been bypassed. What has been noted – with fury by many on social media and with rancour by… Read more »

This week the housing charity Threshold published its 2022 annual report. I was struck, reading it, that the numbers involved in their work were terrifyingly large. Over 50,000 people needed to reach out to the charity in an effort to avoid homelessness. It was a stark reminder of how the homelessness crisis that Ireland has… Read more »

Laudate Deum is clearly written to inspire the delegates who will attend the COP28 meetings in Dubai in December. Francis carefully lays out how previous COPs concluded with high hopes that have never quite delivered. The reader can almost hear his frustration at how every year the Great and the Good gather and discuss these critical issues and every year they disappoint.

The massive costs and long construction times associated with nuclear power means that every euro invested delays decarbonisation. Since the crisis we face is urgent, the wise approach is to prioritise the transitions that are cheapest to build and fastest to deploy.

Research suggests that even switching to cycling or walking one day a week can have significant consequences for our personal carbon footprint and our collective emissions. Developing tailored Irish studies that draw out the kind of emissions reductions that are achieved through school-based active transport initiatives would be an important element of the argument that could encourage local councils to commit to real evidence-based policy.

In conversation on this topic, it becomes clear that most Irish people view neutrality not as a refusal to participate in the struggle for justice, but as a positive commitment to participate in certain ways. That means we don’t build an army capable of joining an invasion force. But that doesn’t stop us from building an army well suited to peacekeeping duties.

The shift to electric cars is an essential element of our climate mitigation strategy. But to repeat a cliché that is fundamentally true: electric cars are not a plan to save the world; they are a plan to save the car industry.

The fact that we have to take everything about SMR technology on trust is important because for almost a century, the unfulfilled promise of the nuclear energy industry has left a trail of destruction in its wake. While carbon-neutral from a certain perspective, any claim that nuclear energy has been good for the environment can only be financially motivated. Apart from the obvious catastrophic impact of the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters, in the ten years from 2006-2016, Greenpeace found 166 “near misses” at nuclear power plants in the USA alone.

At the heart of the prison-black-hole phenomenon is a refusal to recognise the humanity of the prisoner. The person in prison ceases being a citizen, a neighbour, a person with a complex narrative that can explain how they ended up where they are. They no longer warrant our empathy. They become faceless and nameless.