From the Commission on Emigration (1954). It should be the county motto tbh

And data centres, obviously? Even by Irish standards, a gung-ho data centre policy while refusing to invest properly in water infrastructure is bananas

So much of the dicussion on mid-century Irish health metrics focuses on policy debates and the church. Any comparative analysis suggests it was almost all about medicine

Ireland, 1954. Plus ça change

For years the mortality rate in the Irish mental hospitals was way above those in the Gulag. Mullingar was over 12% in 1947. Essentially nobody was dying in the prisons and there was huge variation across institutions. I've found no compelling explanation or investigation on it

In the late 1940s the Department of Health was proudly giving out free DDT as a health measure

From the late 1940s

The first appearance of this font which I feel they used for the next fifty years

One of the weirdest findings on this material wellbeing project is the all-cause death rates in the UK fell sharply during WW2 but not in Ireland. The best explanation I've seen is food price controls but if anyone has a competing explanation please shout

Deep in a statistical abstract from 1948. I'm actually amazed only 1% of @rte.ie broadcasting time was religious services

An impressive breakout from Dundrum mental aylum in 1926

Good news from England where authorities have finally seen sense and ended the pointless culling of badgers. In Ireland on it goes, killing thousands of badgers and costing taxpayers a ball breaking €157 million thus year alone. www.bbc.com/news/article...

This comes back to me every time I see the book now

I'm writing a book on material wellbeing since independence and quite chuffed with these two epigraphs from Cumann na nGaedheal for the opening chapter

Spot on by John Fitzgerald. There's a lot of political cowardice around pretending that the protestors were representative or particularly vulnerable www.irishtimes.com/business/eco...

Still haven't seen a census form that was read properly before they filled it out

We're like that cartoon of the dinosaurs watching the meteor coming www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/0...

Spring

I'm rereading a book by a Nobel-winning economist after 20 years. I was impressed the first time, whereas this time round I can't get over how he says absolutely nothing in as many words as possible With many 'classics' of fact and fiction most of their readers would struggle to summarise the point

We’re delighted to announce the society's 2026 Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Prof Tyler Anbinder of George Washington University. "The Surprising Socio-Economic Mobility of New York’s Great Famine Refugees" Online, 4pm GMT (11am EST), Thurs. 5 Mar. 2026. Register here: www.eshsi.org

Whoever picks the Valentine's movies for TV is really going left field. So far it's been romantic classics including The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, Rocky V and The Killing Fields

I'm writing a book on wellbeing in Ireland. What's striking about the GDP debate is policymakers here rarely treated it as the core metric, which was clearly employment. Similarly Simon Kuznets argued it was a rubbish measure of wellbeing right from its inception www.irishtimes.com/opinion/edit...

It's baffling that people still happily broadcast how many voluntary flights they're taking

I've always found this a really poor solution for a whole range of students

*Taps the sign*

If Bilbo had Chat GPT

Young people in the 1940s wasting their money instead of saving for a house

"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the US" True greatness

We're all like lobsters in a pot being slowly inured to how insane he is Trump vows higher tariffs on eight European countries until US gets Greenland – The Irish Times share.google/Pnkay4bJ4NAK...

Hello historians - there is a specific purpose role now advertised in UL’s history department - Title of Post: Assistant Professor in Irish History (specialism History of the Family) - all details are over on UL vacancies! Do share! #jobsky #skystorians #speirgorm #speirghorm

Alistair Campbell's diary during the Good Friday negotiations "George Mitchell said even for these guys, they were being ridiculous. I asked him if he intended to write a book about the talks. ‘No, the truth would be too awful for words.’"

The logical jumps in this are really something. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

Every night RTÉ is playing some classic movie in the middle of the night and each time I promise myself I'll just go to bed. They do it every Christmas

The footage RTÉ unearths to accompany reporting on the newly-released state documents is almost invariably more interesting than the files themselves.

Upping your spending growth target from 5% to 6% and calling it a fundamental change is impressively creative. The Rainbow govt targeted 2% real spending growth and got close. McCreevy set 4% nominal and got nowhere near it. We've been much more like the latter www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

Just appalled at the way the vote on this went. Three major parties without anything approximating a soul

Future civilisations will marvel at this image. Sages will debate its meaning

It's spectacular that he's survived scandal after scandal, breaking every rule of politics, but for his supporters inflation is the Rubicon.

Props to the sole boys to do music and Spanish for the Inter Cert in 1942 (both passed)

Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage | George Monbiot

It shouldn't need reiteration but most of the kids who ended up in industrial schools were just guilty of being poor.

'The Irish political system is designed so that elected representatives are in constant contact with our communities' The crux of the problem. It doesn't take constant contact to identify what the problems are. Capturing the marginal votes makes for bad policy www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Anti-vaxers in 1940s Ireland

Or, perish the thought, be young? Opinion: Our young people are the future – the next President of Ireland should empower them share.google/IYEIDTXsKnHc...

🗣️ "Are we going to have a conversation, on the level that you are about deportations here, about the crisis of male violence against women in this country?” - News Correspondent, The Journal Eimer McAuley #TonightVMTV

I have a question here

I'm going through the government reports for the past century and the introduction of the school medical service is one of the most interesting things. The public health problems were jaw-dropping, even after years of operation. Here's the results from the inspections in Dublin, 1936-7

This particular cold dish deserves a Michelin star. www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41...

‘Throwing more money at it won't solve the housing crisis. We need more workers.’ Ahead of Budget 2026, Dr Ciarán Casey shares how ‘the proper time to have built infrastructure and housing here was during the last crash’. Read on, in the Journal.ie: www.thejournal.ie/readme/housi... #StayCurious