Reminder for those who love great docs that My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air In Moscow lands on MUBI this weekend.

“The central issue is straightforward. Data centre demand is so large, spatially concentrated, inflexible and growing so quickly, that neither the electricity grid nor renewable generation can keep pace. Fossil gas is filling that gap.”

The highly predictable issues with an over-concentration of data centres in Ireland, their colossal electricity use, and all that means for grid stability, will continue.

Interesting interview with Anne Hidalgo. Hard to think of a more influential European city mayor over the past decade.

There was a good piece on all these various versions by @frankmcdonald60.bsky.social recently.

Wrote about the new influx of American fast-food outlets to Ireland, the chicken boom, and collective comfort eating.

Good report on Greystones’ phone-free childhood initiative.

Una Mullally: Betting on elections and matches is one thing. Gambling on war is something else entirely

Investigation: How raw materials from Aughinish Alumina in Limerick enter Russia’s weapons supply chain

The first LGBT float in a Patrick's Day parade anywhere in the world was in Cork in 1992. Happy queer Patrick's Day. @orlaegan1.bsky.social #SpéirGhorm #SpeirGorm

Wrote about a music festival I recently attended in a mall in Nairobi, and what lessons it offers cities with significant commercial vacancy rates where artists could easily fill the space.

"That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together..." - Arendt

Cartoon Saloon's upcoming film, Kindred Spirits, is inspired by Irish-Choctaw Nation solidarity. Looks beautiful.

Environmental groups in Ireland seeking a High Court review of rules that allow new data centres to use fossil fuels to generate a portion of their electricity.

Una Mullally: Why does it take Kellie Harrington and Troy Parrott to say children need places to play?

Tried to offer some context as to why people were protesting an injunction over alleged noise, taken by the new Hoxton hotel in Dublin City against a neighbouring long-established club and restaurant.

Wrote about U2's surprise new EP, Days of Ash.

Spoke about the story of Jim O’Neill on the Irish Times In The News podcast.

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

Excellent 🧵

“[The FAI] could show a real bit of balls and refuse to play Israel. They should stand up in my view for the Palestinian state, the Palestinian people and the Palestinian football organisation.” - Brian Kerr, former Republic of Ireland manager

Peaceful protests and speech shut down, more than 2,700 arrested, young people on hunger strike, people imprisoned, pensioners dragged away on the streets, and after all that, the UK’s ban on Palestine Action is ruled unlawful.

Thrilled to be bringing the brilliant Sarah Schulman to Dublin for Sliver Salon at Smock Alley Theatre, April 9th. Supported by Dublin Municipal Theatre, in collaboration with Peninsula Press, Outburst Arts, EAF, Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive, and London Review of Books. Get your tickets:

When he ran Labour Together, Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons hired a PR firm to investigate journalists After our revelations, and a flurry of news stories, Simons finally gave his side of the story But it doesn't seem to tally with the facts... 🧵 democracyforsale.substack.com/p/mcsweeney-...

‘Absolute hell’: Irish man with valid US work permit held by Ice since September

Wrote about how more families present to emergency accommodation in the Dublin region due to notices of termination over any other single reason for their homelessness. Evictions are the issue, and building public housing at scale is the solution.

If you're in Ireland, you can watch the Irish Oscar-nominated short film Retirement Plan on the RTÉ Player. Directed by John Kelly, written by Kelly and Tara Lawall.

New polling on Ireland's housing crisis: - 81% want the government to build more social housing "even if there are local objections" - 64% disagree government is making progress on housing - 67% would vote for a constitutional right to housing - 29% are personally affected by the housing crisis

🔴 BREAKING: Labour Together paid controversial PR firm £30k to investigate journalists who were digging into how its undeclared funding Reporters from Sunday Times, Guardian and other outlets targetted *And* Morgan McSweeney knew about it Full story: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

Highly recommend this exhibition, As If, at the International Centre for the Image in Dublin, by Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney and David Donohue. Runs until April 5th.

According to this Guardian investigation, this jet refuelled at Shannon Airport on January 21st and February 1st.

"We are now seeing eviction rates that have not been seen in Ireland since the 1850s." A damning reality laid bare in this piece of well-researched analysis.

I'm totally pinching myself announcing this, but a film about my life journey rewilding a West Cork farm, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, will get its first screening at the Dublin International Film Festival on Saturday the 28th of this month. Tickets are available here: www.diff.ie/programme/an...

Blair and Mandelson will go down in history as crawlers and creeps. “And for what? To be remembered as grasping minions of autocrats and abusers?”

Oh well! To host the last game, the Irish gov spent €4.2m on a licence fee to the NFL, and another €5m on infrastructure and “operational costs”. DCC spent €350,000. Imagine if that money was spent on local sporting initiatives? A lot of kids in Dublin City don’t even have a pitch to play on.

Good piece by Keith Duggan in Minneapolis.

Good piece on the generally very ropey “job creation” figures when it comes to data centres.

MUBI has acquired My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, and the upcoming sequel My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile. Part 1 was the best film I saw in 2025. It's almost five and a half hours long, but there's not a moment wasted. Highly recommend.

The doctors and therapists treating people experiencing A.I. delusions and suffering from A.I. chatbot-induced psychosis.

The European Commission has launched a new formal investigation against X under the Digital Services Act, to "assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok's functionalities into X in the EU."

Tá agallamh agam leis an ealaíontóir Fearghus Ó Conchúir san Irish Times inniú.

Last month, I wrote about the very sad story of Jim O’Neill, whose body was found in the Phoenix Park in Nov 2023, but whose family wasn’t informed of his death until Dec 2024. Today, his family met with Fiosrú, Office of the Garda Ombudsman, who are investigating the Garda handling of the case.

Looking forward to hosting this conversation with Maria 'Masha' Alyokhina of Pussy Riot in Belfast on January 29th as part of the Out To Lunch Arts Festival. Her new book, Political Girl – Life and Fate in Russia, is out now. Tickets are from £8, details here:

AI companies insist LLMs are "learning" rather than storing copyrighted works in their "memory". Is that so? "OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books."

Wrote about the Irish government's plan to expand data centre development across the country through the new Large Energy User Action Plan. Ireland has very high data centre density already, with around 50% of metered electricity in the Dublin area used by data centres, and 22% nationally.

The Irish Times view on the price of a pint: not so plain

Interesting new report from the European Council on Foreign Relations. - Just 16% of EU citizens now see the US as an ally - 66% of people surveyed in the UK feel pessimistic about their country's future - 37% of Russians surveyed feel the US is an adversary (down from 64% in 2024)

Update on this from the Complex CEO/Artistic Director, Vanessa Fielding.

The Complex arts centre in Dublin is set to close today barring a last-minute funding breakthrough.

Full coverage of very interesting Media Committee meeting with Gardaí currently focusing on X / Grok.