Really looking forward to reading Sally Hayden’s new book. Beautiful theme, brilliant journalist, excellent writer. “I needed to remember there is goodness in the world, that torture and exploitation and abuse are not the default behaviours of humans.”

Reuse of vacant buildings could meet 40% of Dublin’s housing targets, report finds

Revealed: Ireland approved €20m in dual-use exports to IDF and Israeli Defence Ministry at height of Gaza war thecurrency.news/articles/226...

Incredible work by this Donegal student who developed a biodegradable plastic that breaks down safely and also helps remove existing microplastics from the environment.

The Irish Times view on Oliver Bond House: State has a moral obligation

Liz Carolan: Social media was once the future for big tech. Now it’s a liability

Interesting story here about developers working for Google apparently misstating in planning documents how much carbon two proposed AI datacentres will contribute to the UK’s total emissions.

Covalen, a company Meta outsources its content moderation to in Dublin, is laying off 720 workers, more than half of whom will receive no redundancy pay.

Excellent Farage cartoon by Martyn Turner in this weekend’s Irish Times.

A second Irish citizen who was threatened with expulsion from Germany has had their expulsion order struck out. Charges related to a protest were not pursued "after it emerged Murray was already in police custody at the time the alleged events they were being charged with took place."

Instagram and Facebook are being investigated over content recommender systems

The voter registration deadline for the Dublin Central and Galway West by-elections is midnight tonight. You can check the register here: www.voter.ie #SpeirGorm

Wrote about Drury Street in Dublin and how the secret to successful pedestrianisation is more pedestrianisation.

Cinemas for sale in Ireland. It would be amazing to see these come back into use.

Good piece on the new Bohemians Cooperatives, and their community wealth-building strategy. I was one of the speakers at the launch of it last night, and there were so many smart ideas in the room. More cooperatives + more community ownership = better city

Shane O'Brien, one of the Irish citizens involved in the Palestine solidarity movement in Berlin who was threatened with deportation from Germany, has been acquitted on all charges related to a protest. A video provided by his defence appeared to contradict key testimony by police officers.

“More than 20 years ago, Susan Sontag argued that the problem with war on television was never that viewers stopped caring. It was that the medium was organized to keep attention moving, to make every image replaceable by the next.” Nick Mafi on war and scrolling.

Lots of interesting detail in this report, including how public sentiment in Ireland is broadly resisting anti-trans “culture war” narratives we’ve seen elsewhere - particularly in the U.K. and US - and support for trans people and their rights is actually increasing. Full report here:

Can't wait for this!

Brilliant show from The Prodigy and Carl Cox in Dublin last night. So much energy, and a crowd that lifted off from the get go. Really enjoyed it. I reviewed it for The Irish Times here.

The Irish Times visited Lanzarote as part of an investigation into Hutch’s property interests. In an interview, the veteran criminal talks about his ‘exaggerated’ property holdings, hope of becoming the ‘richest’ TD and confidence of being exonerated in a Spanish criminal investigation.

Ahead of the Dublin Central and Galway West bye-elections next month, I’ve analysed, merged, and extended various datasets to gather insights from all bye-elections over the last century. Article now published at @news.rte.ie 📄 www.rte.ie/news/analysi... 15 stats based on this analysis ⤵️

Wrote about how Leo Varadkar is rewriting the rule book on how former taoisigh act. While Varadkar may have made the transition from politician to private citizen himself, the general public hasn’t. When he passes comment, people don't hear the words of a pundit or punter, but of Fine Gael.

Really enjoyed this piece on Robyn by Jia Tolentino from last month.

“The Irish surplus is the largest in the EU per capita, yet our infrastructure index is below Poland’s... The State takes in €126 billion a year and cannot create a civil protection agency, a gas storage facility or a train to Donegal.” Sinéad O’Sullivan making some solid points.

Agallamh le Kneecap san Irish Times inniú. Rinneamar as Gaeilge é, agus tá aistriúchán as Béarla ar fáil chomh maith. Interview with Kneecap in today’s Irish Times. It’s in Irish, and an English translation is also available at this link: www.irishtimes.com/culture/musi...

Almost 19,000 applications received from US citizens for Irish passports last year

New figures: - Child homelessness in Ireland rose 19% in a year - 5,571 children in emergency accom - around a third of people homeless in Dublin are children - record high number of people in emergency accom (figures do not include people sleeping rough, couch-surfing, in refuges etc.)

The number of United States troops travelling through Ireland has increased by almost 80 per cent before and during US attacks on Iran, figures obtained by The Irish Times show. www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026...

In 20 years time, young Dubliners will look at photos of the building this thing replaced and be aghast at how and why it was demolished, just as so many of us have looked at beautiful buildings knocked before it.

This is what happens when you have Big Tech business executives imagine how to force their products into school. It confuses the task output with the educational purpose of the task itself. For 20 years I’ve been seeing this from Silicon Valley, they simply do not learn.

The excellent arts lineup for Beyond The Pale has been announced! Really excited to bring a new piece to the festival. Grianstad: The Trip, by myself and Jane Arnison, is an immersive sound experience rooted in the landscape and mythology of Glendalough. www.itsbeyondthepale.ie/arts26

There was no competitive process that resulted in Robert Watt becoming the chief executive of the new Dublin City Regeneration Authority, salary €280,000.

"Microsoft and DigitalEurope, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, secured a secrecy provision in EU law to block public access to critical information on data centres’ environmental impact."

Wrote about how and why everything is so 90s.

Great reporting here and several wild details: “A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.”

I'm listening to the audiobook of Melissa Auf der Maur's memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, at the moment, and it's so good. An early highlight for 2026 music books.

Wow.

Lelia Doolan (91) has walked 220km across Ireland to protest the US military's use of Shannon.

Some interesting pieces on the “fuel protests” in Ireland. You don’t have to agree with everything, it’s just good to think. (1/2)
 - Fintan O'Toole: (link below) - Sinead O'Sullivan: www.butthistime.com/p/mind-the-gap 
 - Liz Carolan on the narrative battle: www.thebriefing.ie/missed-appoi...

"The paid Facebook ad, the trucker-convoy framing, the infrastructure-obstruction model, the international amplifier pipeline. These are not neutral tools the left can pick up and use better. They are a specific political technology developed over the last 2 years by a specific organising tendency."

"The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran."

We talk a lot about brain rot, less so about soul rot. Wrote about that, and the poetry of the great Gabriel Rosenstock.

Una Mullally: Maverick poet Gabriel Rosenstock offered a much-needed antidote to soul rot

Essential article on the fuel protests in Ireland.

Clear and informative piece by Isabel Hayes about the wording of court reports in Ireland, and what’s involved in distilling often distressing evidence for the public.

Fíor bhrónach faoi bás Gabriel Rosenstock. Fear uasal agus file agus scriobhnoir ceannródaíoch le hintinn draíochtúil. Bhrúigh a chuid filíocht na teoireanta. D’oscail sé doirse cruthaitheachta ná raibh fhios ag daoine fiú a bhí dúnta.

Wrote about whether anyone actually really needs coffee delivery by drone, and tried to figure out why I find the noise of drones so intrusive.

Sinéad O’Sullivan on Ireland’s missing strategy for navigating the current fuel and energy crisis. On data centres: “they run on energy that Ireland does not produce and cannot guarantee. We negotiated the tax arrangements without ever negotiating the energy security that hosting them requires.”