Thinking about the successor-to-Dublin-Bikes discussion at the Mobility SPC last week. I love bikes but I'm not so sure that inviting US corporations in to run our infrastructure is in the interests of Dubliners. la.streetsblog.org/2025/05/07/l...

This article in The Journal remains the best piece telling this story by just setting out the numbers. www.thejournal.ie/snapshot-of-...

It has been a feature of the Irish State for the last 100 years that it peruses policies- I mean, it really goes at them hard- without ever stating those policies at the political level. This leaves our political debates weirdly unreal, as they never get to addressing what the state is doing.

There's a Lebanese family that lives near me. Their sister/sister-in-law and her family (in total nine people) were killed by an Israeli bomb a few days ago, and we're supposed to play football against the nation invading Lebanon and killing people indiscriminately as if this isn't happening?

Really useful antidote to the bullshit from FF/FG on the Triple Lock diminishing Irish sovereignty. TLDR; The EU is modifying the Libyan naval arms embargo (Operation Irini) to be a "collective defence" operation against Russia and so it can't keep its UN SC mandate. x.com/ClareDalyIRL...

He says it himself "... including services in the bill could potentially damage Ireland..."in terms of potential impacts on US multinationals based here back in America". Once again, Martin confirming that he legislates at the behest of another nation. Fianna Fáil are bought. #Spéirgorm

Something that's difficult to accept, because it's socially awkward, is that those who aren't anti-Zionist but have an active interest in current affairs or modern history are either comfortable with extreme racist violence or want to remain on good terms with people who are. x.com/ireallyhatey...

When rents are rising faster than they have in decades, and there are record numbers of evictions and people in homelessness, and the govt response is "the plan is working", I say we take them at their word

When Eric "Salò" Shmidt or other capitalist aristocracy are haranguing graduates about understanding how they're just part of an LLM pipeline now it's because US capitalism has made an unprecedented bet on the AI slopification of everything and the bet has to work out or the social order is at risk.

Did any EU premier or @EU_Commission member condemn, or even mention, the mass killing of children by America in Iran in its unprovoked attack? Does no one think that's a problem for the project, that we're willing to ignore the mass murder of children for Atlantacism? news.sky.com/video/on-the...

The emboldening of the extreme right is terrifying The fact it is happening as the left is demonised, vilified and criminalised is not coincidental and it should terrify us even more as it is where resistance only exists The liberal bulwark was always a fantasy

He's a gaslighting bag of shit.

I often think about how LLM superfans think artificial general intelligence, when achieved, will be able to produce truly novel insights based on the current sum of human knowledge, genius as a service, when it seems more likely it will be like your average undersocialized but extremely online guy.

The entire time I've been following the struggle for Palestinian liberation (~28y) the hunting and killing of small children by Israelis has been both completely normal and ignored and whitwhitewashed by the Western establishment. If you know a Zionist you know someone who supports child murder.

The hilarious thing about this is that he agreed with everything this woman said, tried his best to placate her, and it still wasn't enough. It's never enough for these people. As soon as you agree with them on one thing, they start fucking moaning about something else they saw on Facebook.

I'm seeing a PR push from the folks trying to build Thorium reactors that they jam into shipping containers to sell to data centres. Probably just a coincidence that the Irish govt is suddenly trying to make nuclear power legal. For our benefit, I'm certain.

The European Union approach to the US/Israeli war on Iran would make Dick Cheney blush and yet nowhere in the Irish or European press will you read about the neoconization of EU institutional politics.

It’s funny because the hegemonic belief is that reparations for the descendants of the enslaved is totally impractical.

And he said "I can't turn down the brightness any more", which I made him repeat because I was flabbergasted. I said "well the turn it off". Which he did not do, he moved seats and proceeded to check his phone every few minutes. He was on Whatsapp and also CHECKING THE CRUDE OIL PRICES.

New stock in Oxfam Rathmines. RIP to someone’s insufferable grandad

I'm going to start calling all multi story car parks 'car sheds'

Note for years voters have been literally pleading with FFG to build houses. Billionaires set up a thinktank promoting putting sheds in back gardens where tenants would have no rights and this is implemented almost overnight.

For those wondering the secure bicycle park at University Hospital Kerry has cost 1/12,000th of the cost overrun (so far) of our new National Children's Hospital. The UHK bike shed is also already in use, another significant difference with the still empty NCH. www.rte.ie/news/politic...

Having a happy memory of when I flew off my bicycle after hitting a newly raised kerb at Grafton Street (miraculously escaping injury other than some friction burns on my arms) and three Brazilian passers-by applauding me when I got up and shook myself off as if it had been a Jackass style stunt.

every time Sinn Féin find a new bike shed to complain about, I drop them one place down my preferences in the next election

My cartoon in today's @irishexaminer.bsky.social.

The memory politics of the EU are now mainly about delegitimizing the Soviet defeat of European fascism because the states of the former Soviet Union and Germany are angrier with post WW2 communism than the Holocaust (or the deaths of 27 million Russians due to the Nazis and their collaborators).

In United Capitalist States of America news reacts to markets.

Here's your attack on rural Ireland #spéirgorm

Once again, "Palestinians are not really people" is the default operating assumption of Western elites.

Just occurred to me, using very basic biological metaphor, we have with LLMs created a virus that attacks information validity. All of our structures for making and confirming factual information are under attack from LLM created information that mimics healthy information enough to get established

When you compare the response of EU institutions to the US/Israeli war on Iran (which started with the mass murder of young children and the Iranian head of state) and Iranian retaliation for the attack it's hard not to think the European project is irredeemable.

So the constant foregrounding of far-right talking points and subsequent shift in that direction by the established parties has only benefited the far right politically? Wow, that's never happened before. 🙄 🙃

I was wondering what Canadian actress Cara Gee was up to and was surprised to see Google say that she's in Star Trek:SNW, as she is not. Why you might ask, does it do this? Well Gemini found a Facebook page saying that people mistook Gee for Christina Chong, who is in SNW, and "reasoned" it out.

Not now tiny Linux root privilege escalation that can apparently escape containers. #copyfail arstechnica.com/security/202...

The Captcharon is a tough nut to crack... more than twice our guns, more than twice our numbers, and they will sell their lives dearly.

The one down side of PR-STV is for the upcoming by-election the Galway West Ballot paper will have 17 options to scroll through with at least 6 -7 fash & fash adjacent cranks.... unfortunately anti-immigrant crank Noel Thomas has a high chance of taking Connolly's seat. www.rte.ie/news/2026/05...

I wish journalists would stop writing shit like this. We cannot say a country is "rich" when its wealth is controlled by a very tiny minority, the rest of its citizens can't afford homes, and its health service is perpetually underfunded. 🤬

Trying to decide whether Progress Ireland are best described as Continuity Progress Democrats, dress down IBEC or the Real YFG. It's a billionaire funded lobby group for knob twiddling neoliberalism marketed directly at ministers and civil servants to bypass all that ugly electoral politics.

Sat down in a café for morning expresso beside a one year old who decided I was interesting. The cuteness was overwhelming, twelve thousand generations has resulted in helpless infants being simply adorable. Who would not die to save one? And why has the killing of infants become everyday news?

When slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1834, the following Irish surnames were present in the long list of compensated slave-owners: Barry, Bourke, Boyle, Brady, Brennan, Broderick, Buckley, Burke, Byrne, Carey, Carroll, Codd, Coleman, Collins, Conway, Corbett, Costello, Cowan, Creighton, Crowley

If I could talk to the animals who did this I'd tell them they're not big or clever.

When this happens in a country with a budget surplus of €9 billion, it is absolutely a choice of governance.

Strangely enough, if you ask a company with shareholders demanding annual returns “Do you want to run these services responsibly or do you want to make as much money as possible by cutting costs to the very bare minimum required to keep the lights on”, they do not say “Oh, responsibly, please”.

So what, shrugs compromised Government.

Eventually the way in which the dominant political faction of the centre right in the Western world since the fall of the Soviet Union embraced anti-intellectualism as a way to close off political ground to their left is going to make a great topic for some Phd in China.

Collins is trying to make out that international protection applicants are competing with Irish people for housing. This is not just not true, it's disinformation. A shameful racist lie.

An absolutely insane article where the @news.rte.ie correspondent immediately segues from a massacre by Israel that killed 300 people in ten minutes to talking about Lebanon ridding itself of Hezbollah to avenge the 2005 assassination of Hariri. Murdoch press level dishonesty and tendenentiousness.

Yeah, and it's pretty much only been allowed to get this way because everyone sensible just refused to believe it was true, because surely you, scum leftist, must be wrong.