My experience of the upper echelons of the Labour Party involved being condescended to by the incredibly thick & unpleasant, & thinking that in any other walk of life you would get punched in the mouth for treating people like that. Impossible to overstate how high on their own fumes they are.

Scathing stuff from Cornelius in Spiegel "What one heard sounded timid. It sounded like Scholz, Merkel, and Schröder... ... And what one read sounded even more timid... the statement informs us that both sides had consulted 'on the Ukraine question.'The Ukraine QUESTION"

Our party has just come third in Gorton and Denton, a previously safe Labour seat - an area where we haven't lost an election since 1931. It is those running our party who are to blame. We need change at the top and serious lessons need to be learnt:

Pretty evident from questions at PAC this morning (already centring on allocation of SNAs for this year and next, etc) that some politicians still have zero grasp of either the policymaking or budgetary processes

Man the self control EU officials must have not to whisper 'Brexit means brexit' under their breath in all these meetings

The US government have become masters of exploiting European vulnerabilities. Why won't Europeans even consider exploiting the American vulnerabilities that they have leverage over? That's the question asked today by @davidcarretta.bsky.social in Morning Post:

What a great idea, invite a team representing a genocidal state, with a violent fan base riddled with child killers to a country who's supporters are very openly pro-palestinian and watch as the media "both sides" clashes instigated by the former. #Ireland #speirgorm

Viktor Orban is now 20 points behind in the polls - and so he has ordered the military to guard “key energy facilities” against a possible Ukrainian “attack.” Hungarians fear he plans a fake national security emergency or false-flag incident before the April 12 election apnews.com/article/hung...

Reminder journalists would rather be on there since at least they dont get criticized once

Pop ecology gives us appealing slogans—“nature knows best,” “the balance of nature”—but fails to reflect reality and so misleads agriculture. Here's what the ecology of reality actually tells us. My latest... csanr.wsu.edu/pop-ecology/

Everywhere but Italy support for peacekeepers in Ukraine rising. Interesting

What Europeans also don't realize is that they have the political leverage. In a market-moving US-EU economic spat, European voters would back their leaders, as they want to punch the US bully. Americans would just be exasperated. We'd think this was dumb why and blame Trump for it. Hence, TACO.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot has banned US Ambassador Charles Kushner — father of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner — from meeting French government officials as he "did not appear" when summoned over comments made by the Trump administration over a French far-right activist's killing.

The children. They yearn for the dial-up

The US ambassador to France has failed to show up to a diplomatic summons - now banned from meeting French government officials Jared Kushner's dad was called in after comments regarding the death in Lyon of radical far-right student Quentin Deranque

I had the opportunity to contribute to @immikesheridan.bsky.social's brilliant doc Amplified, on how US culture wars and extreme ideas are influencing Ireland. It's now available to watch on Apple TV, Amazon, and Google Play. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaFJ...

This will always be cheaper than buying up land and pushing out potential stewards who will take pride in their work (you'd be surprised, my dad believed in ripping out hedges in the 90s now HATES seeing hedges flailed to death!) #speirgorm

'Are you active on twitter' should be on every Garda vetting form and you can't convince me otherwise. Might not need their hard drives check but certainly seem the sort to look the other way...#speirgorm

If you cannot rebel against a website run by a Nazi, that has turned into an imaged-based sexual abuse platform, you will rebel against fuck all. You'll sit and cluck while everything gets worse and continue to shake a cup to fund it all. Happy Monday.

Grotesque.

House GOP: “Government officials — whether in the United States, the European Union, or elsewhere — serve the public and must be accountable to it." Photo unrelated.

Lithuanian FM Kęstutis Budrys tells me it’s now time to stop Hungary’s abuse of the veto in crucial EU decision-making Change EU rules to stop Hungary's abuse of veto, Lithuanian foreign minister says www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

😂😂😂 ah FT. How about ask the Brits or Aussies just how good Europe is at deals. Ironically EU is doing the 'speak softly and a big (Anti-Coercion) stick' #EU #speirgorm

Call me an economic nationalist, or a Luddite but mad idea here, I don't think a spreadsheet in Zurich, New York or Antwerp should decide whether our kids can attend college or children are homeless. The fact we've just accepted that...is insane to me #speirgorm #housing

“Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.” - Terry Pratchett

The Yanks do seem to have a disproportionately large % of grown men willing to beat up 13yr old girls...

Wow! In a (debatable) trade off between convenience and security Irish ministers, Peter and James opt for convenience. #SpeirGorm #SpéirGhorm

Expect a lot more of this in red areas as things fall apart for MAGA at the national level

So to recap: if you're a MAGA American official you have the free speech right to say whatever you want and meddle into other countries politics. But if you're not a MAGA American, then you have no free speech right to criticise the United States or Trump. The hypocrisy is farcical.

A lot of people, including me, were wondering how an IRB could ever approve this study. The answer is that no IRB did. The person who “signed off” on approval from the only ethics board that reviewed it had resigned three years earlier. His signature was used without his knowledge.

John Collison, who uncritically interviewed Musk recently www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p... should be asked about that interview and his view on the fascist-tendencies of some tech billionaires in future business section interviews (I am always open to interviewing either of the Collison brothers)

Nothing will ever beat @patrickfreyne.bsky.social's description of the British royal obsession/excuses. Except it's like now they found out one was John Wayne Gacy but they're only arresting him for not paying taxes for performing as a clown #speirgorm

Qui est ce «Vincent, ami de #Quentin», mis en avant pour la manifestation de samedi ? Un membre de Lyon Populaire - groupe dissous en 2025 pour son exaltation du nazisme, entre autres - selon les infos de @mediapart.fr. Il travaille aussi pour une députée RN.👇 www.mediapart.fr/journal/fran...

@aoc.bsky.social wtf please do not amplify this grifter!!! Broken clock maybe but he's the worst of the worst for health conspiracies. Someone on her team please talk sense into whoever tweeted this.

Prime example of why there is no safe level of exposure to X propaganda, no matter how immune you think you are. One day you're a highly intelligent, influential political leader. The next you're sharing content from an Infowars conspiracy theorist to your millions of followers. Get off that site.

Every so often this painfully misinformed graph does the rounds. Up there with the 'sun causes global warming' graphs for reinforcing people's existing opinions via misinformation

first they came for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and I said nothing, but i did laugh quite a lot

Aaaaaand look whose on the bottom of the graph for transport yet again #speirgorm

Emails released by DOJ reveal the Israeli UN mission coordinated with Jeffrey Epstein’s staff to install surveillance at a Manhattan apartment used by Ehud Barak. Setup highlights a direct operational link between the state and Epstein’s enterprise.

Increasingly hard to ignore the fact that Germany's direction in the EU has led us to war (Ukraine) and weakness (austerity) vs France's idea of sovereign independence. Now they might be proved right on the US too #speirgorm

Interesting work. Imo, this sentence illustrates the significant shift and explains why traditional car makers are lagging behind: “Still, the two vehicles are broadly comparable: similar size, similar LFP batteries, the Seal equipped with a Qualcomm chip and the Model 3 with Tesla’s in-house chip.”

🚨A Warsaw court has issued a new European Arrest Warrant for a fugitive Polish lawmaker living in Hungary, who is wanted in connection with an investigation into the alleged large-scale misuse of public funds under Poland’s previous right-wing government.

The Belgian government has clashed with the US after Donald Trump's ambassador accused Brussels of antisemitism over its laws regulating circumcision. #EuropeNews

“Epstein tried to get dirt on Trump to [Putin via] Lavrov, Lavrov held private meeting with Trump 110 days into his first presidency* with Russian media ONLY, next day FBI Director Comey is fired…” @merket.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/ifin... www.threads.com/@merket/post... bsky.app/profile/ifin...

I get more & more social media about switching food brands from US companies to EU ones. It's amazing how few Irish food products beyond dairy are common abroad. Like objectively our worse crisps are better than "Lays" yet they're everywhere on #EU continent #speirgorm Also Fritz/Kofola > Coca-Cola

Literally the meme

Very interesting to see will this story jump the Celtic Sea. Far Right individual killed and now political fallout in the French National Assembly for France Unbowed (La France Insoumise) because one MP's political assistant was arrested. #speirgorm

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

Exactly this when I hear people complain about IFA. If you resent their reach it's entirely because over 60 years from its birth out of Macra (itself established as a progressive org) lots of ordinary farmers worked damn hard. Meanwhile Irish union movement ate its own young & many 1/2 #speirgorm