Forgive the raised eyebrow; it is, after all, my only organ …

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Most politicians, however, the vast, comfortable majority, do something far more disingenuous and sensible. They discover that political principles are surprisingly flexible things, like ligaments that stretch further than you’d think under the right pressure. A little career opportunity here, a ministerial car there, the warm approval of the media, and suddenly yesterday’s non-negotiable becomes today’s regrettable necessity, best understood in context, you see. The rhetoric is quietly laundered. The betrayals are rebranded as maturity, and one learns to pronounce pragmatism with the same pious inflexion once reserved for Sinn Féin’s musings on geopolitical events.

In the absurd theatre of Sinn Féin’s revolutionary postures, where every keffiyeh is a costume and every slogan a sales pitch for its website merch, Sinn Féin has once again demonstrated the exquisite art of talking out of both sides of its mouth on both sides of the border. These are the self-appointed guardians of Irish Republicanism, the party that drapes itself in the banner of those oppressed by Western imperialism, chanting against occupation and bombings while quietly signing off on the machinery that enables it. Political hypocrisy, that tired old gal, has rarely looked so well-fed.

To most Irish people, Castledawson is a geographical or literary footnote, the quiet satellite village of Magherafelt hovering in the penumbra of Seamus Heaney’s childhood. Nobel Prize-winner, poet, playwright, excavator of turf and trauma: Heaney, that great digger of the soul’s hypocrisy, a man who could make the act of remembering feel like a moral accusation. He wrote as if the earth itself were complicit in our betrayals - every furrow a lie we told ourselves about belonging, every syllable of moss and silt freighted with the knowledge that we are never quite who we claim to be. In Castledawson’s shadow, he learned that the self is mostly peat: dark, wet, and liable to preserve the evidence of its own crimes for centuries. The memories of The Troubles will bear testament to this, although you could drive through Castledawson without noticing the place at all, the way one might walk home after a few pints, not really noticing anything.

But behold: in the damp, usually unassuming fields of Heaney’s Mid Ulster, a factory churns out precision components for the F-35 fighter jet, a sleek, 100-million-dollar angel of death. It apparently has the most advanced sensor suite of any fighter jet in history. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds quite deadly. These are the same jets that scream over Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, all over the Middle East, turning buildings into lumps of concrete meshed with blood. Israel pilots them with the serene confidence of a people who believe their own press releases; they have something in common with Sinn Féin there. And Sinn Féin, oh, noble Sinn Féin, could not quite muster the revolutionary vigour to object to the extension of its local killing machine factory in Castledawson. The council’s 16-member planning committee voted to permit the enlargement of Moyola Precision Engineering, which makes components for the F-35 jet fighter. A combined total of three SDLP and Independents voted against the motion. The five DUP councillors, of course, voted for the plant. Seven Sinn Féin Councillors abstained, so the motion passed, jobs were “protected,” and the great wheel of political hypocrisy turned another inch. The pro-Palestine sentiment, it would appear, is strictly decorative: excellent for murals, marches, moral superiority on social media and shouting across the Dáil chamber. It’s rather less useful when it collides with the unglamorous business of Northern Irish employment statistics.

It is a quieter apostasy, almost genteel. No dramatic resignation letters, no lonely purity. Just the soft Sinn Féin surrender: the abstention where once there would have been at the very least some performative outrage, now there’s just careful silence where once there would have been fire and brimstone. The soul was not so much sold but gently repurposed, as you might an old whorehouse turned into luxury flats. And in the end, sure, the Sinn Féin politician will hardly notice the difference. One still believes, after all. Still believes in the cause, the United Ireland, ‘Up the Ra', the solidarity with whomever Israel is bombing. The Sinn Féin politician believes in being on the inside, where decisions are made, jobs are protected, and the terrible killing machinery of the world is at least made by the decent people who work in the surrounding areas.

Investigative news website, The Detail, has previously reported how Martin Butcher, Oxfam’s policy adviser on arms and conflict, said that the unique set-up of the F-35 programme means it is “absolutely” the case that parts produced in the UK – including Northern Ireland – would end up in Israeli jets. He said it is a certainty that components produced in the UK are going to Israel “either in new aircraft from the United States or as parts from a regional warehouse”.

This is the eternal comedy of Sinn Féin’s geopolitical posturing. Once upon a time, when Sinn Féin knew something about asymmetric warfare (well, their terrorist wing did) and the long, grinding hypocrisy of empires that preach peace while arming their favourites. Now they sit in Stormont, playing at governance, discovering that the Irish struggle was never meant to inconvenience Lockheed Martin or the delicate sensitivities of investment portfolios of billionaires. The factory produces components for war that kill the same people they claim to be advocating for; there’s a word for that. The parts slot neatly into American-made fuselages. The bombs fall, and children become statistics in Sinn Féin’s janus faced abstension. And somewhere in a mid-Ulster committee room, a councillor shrugs: sure, it’s only components, and they don’t go direct to Israel, but indirectly and think of the local lads with steady wages. It is the same familiar pseudo-liberal sleight of hand, repackaged in a tricolour. Gesture left, invest right. Condemn the Middle East wars in ringing prose, then facilitate the supply chain that keeps the planes in the air. The moral architecture of their mental gymnastics is impeccable: we are against the use of these machines for evil, you understand, but the manufacture is a regrettable economic necessity. One must be pragmatic. One must not alienate the Americans. One must remember that Palestine is very far away, and the Moyola Precision Engineering plant is right here, employing decent people who vote. How deliciously inconsistent and hypocritical. The same party that once dreamed of driving the British out now ensures that the instruments of distant slaughter remain a well-oiled part of the British economy. The revolution will not be televised but industrialised.

Sinn Féins crowning hypocrisy blooms elsewhere, in the softer political climes of the Republic, where Sinn Féin’s elected mouthpieces thunder from the Dáil against the Irish government’s failure to impose real sanctions on Israel. Sinn Féin TD Cathal Gould, in a moment of raw, unfiltered self-absorbed piety, declared that he hoped Benjamin Netanyahu would burn in hell. A satisfying image, no doubt: the old butcher roasting eternally on some Dantean spit, turning slowly above the flames he helped stoke. But one wonders whether the fire extends quite so generously to the mechanical enablers, those quiet facilitators of the machinery itself. Does hell have a special circle reserved for the seven Sinn Féin politicians on Mid Ulster Council who, faced with the chance to halt the expansion of a local factory churning out components for the F-35, chose the path of abstention, pragmatism, and a quiet nod to the continuation of business as usual instead?

Pearse Doherty, with the solemn gravity of a man reading his own obituary, declared that Ireland must not be complicit in genocide. In fairness, he didn’t specify which Ireland. The words landed like a stone into still water, clear, resonant, morally unimpeachable. He delivered them in the Dáil, voice steady, eyes fixed on some distant horizon of principle, the weight of Irish history and international law pressing nobly upon his shoulders. Ireland, he insisted, could not stand idly by while the machinery of extermination ground on in Gaza. Complicity was not an option. The Republic must act. How stirring it must have felt, that declaration. How perfectly calibrated for the evening news and the solidarity rallies. And yet, just across the border, in the unromantic precincts of Mid Ulster, the same party’s councillors found themselves strangely paralysed when the moment came to withhold complicity from something rather closer to home: a factory quietly extending its lease on the production of components for the very F-35s that make such efficient work of turning Middle Eastern neighbourhoods into rubble. Ireland must not be complicit, they say. And then, with a small shrug and an abstention, they ensure that it is. Granted, it’s Northern Ireland, but that’s where Sinn Féin are in government. Doherty can’t blame the seven Sinn Féin abstentions on “the Brits”.

It is a deliciously precise hypocrisy. Mary Lou McDonald, leader of the party, stands in the Republic’s parliment and demands that the Irish government impose real sanctions on Israel, boycotts, embargoes, the full ceremonial apparatus of righteous isolation. Her voice cauterwauls with moral urgency; the Dáil echoes with the sound of revolutionary theatre. Yet just over the border, in the damp committee rooms of the North, her own councillors cannot quite bring themselves to vote against the very components that keep those Israeli jets in the air. The killing machines are apparently exempt from sanction when they provide local jobs. One imagines the Israeli ambassador permitting himself a thin, knowing smile: how convenient, this partitioned conscience. South of the border, protests outside the embassy, keffiyehs and righteous chants; north of it, a gentle pat on the back from the Red Hand of Ulster, hoping the orders for F-35 parts keep flowing.

Sinn Féin demands boycotts, arms embargoes, the cancellation of the upcoming international soccer match with Israel, the full theatrical apparatus of moral isolation, as though the blood on Gaza’s streets had somehow stained their own hands by association. How stirring it all sounds from the opposition benches: principled, uncompromising, the authentic voice of Irish anti-imperialism reborn. The quiet expansion of an F-35 components factory in Castledawson is merely a regrettable fact of economic life. One half of the movement shakes its fist at Tel Aviv; the other half ensures the planes keep flying out of it. It is not inconsistency so much as a studied division of labour: performative rage in Dublin, pragmatic complicity in the North. The revolution, it seems, stops at the border, and even then, only when convenient.

A united Ireland, we are solemnly informed, would be a bastion of strict neutrality, an ancient Celtic Switzerland, unblemished by the grubby entanglements of faraway wars. No more would Irish soil feed the war machines of other countries; the Irish Republic would stand radiant and aloof, hands clean, voice pure, a moral exemplar for the ages. Yet one cannot help but notice the small print in this radiant prospectus. For the same party that demands Ireland remain strictly neutral in the Dáil, denouncing complicity, calling for sanctions, painting the government as war mongers and craven for its insufficient outrage, Sinn Féin quietly ensures, north of the border, that the components feeding Israel’s F-35 fighter jets keep flowing without interruption. A united Ireland, it seems, could be strictly neutral in the abstract, provided the factories stay open, the jobs remain protected, and the quiet patronage of the arms economy continues uninterrupted. In Mid-Ulster, it turns its cheek for Israel’s interests by default; in Leinster House, it votes for the performance of opposition to them. The border may one day vanish, but the sleight-of-hand is already seamless: neutrality for the cameras, supply chain for the balance sheet. Pro-Palestine between the sheets, F-35’s between the sheets. The thirty-two counties would simply inherit thirty-two different excuses.

Meanwhile, the keffiyeh stays draped over the microphone for the cameras. The dead across the Middle East do not get a say in how Sinn Féin votes on planning applications. They never do. This is not betrayal so much as revelation of sorts. The mask slips, and underneath there is only the same banal face of power: smiling, managerial, ever so slightly embarrassed, but fundamentally committed to keeping the killing machine running. Sinn Féin stands with Palestine, Iran, all the oppressed peoples of the world, they tell us, right up until the point where standing costs something tangible, then it stands with the quiet continuation of the murderous world as it is: the same world it lectures the rest of us about with such theatrical indignation and let’s be honest, rank hypocrisy and deceitfulness. Then again, Sinn Féin has always maintained an ambiguous relationship with bombs being used to kill people.

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The president, in his Mar-a-Lago twilight, surrounded by ledgers that glow with unholy light, as Trump coin and Bitcoin and whatever fresh digital slime the markets have birthed that week congeal into solid, vulgar illgotten wealth. The family enterprise, that strange hybrid of hotel chain, meme factory, and sovereign statelet, humming along like some vast subterranean machine fed on attention and grievance. Outside, the republic creaks under its usual burdens: housing, healthcare, cost of living, wars in the Middle East, and other such trivialities. Inside, the scam coins rain down in torrents, each one a tiny monument to the triumph of the internet over matter.

How fitting, in this late-stage crypto carnival of our civilisation, that the highest office in the United States should be so gloriously monetised. The old republic of yeoman farmers, Minutemen and enlightenment gentlemen has long since dissolved into slurry; what remains is a man who turned the presidency itself into content, and content into coin, until the distinction between governance and grift became as thin and insubstantial as a blockchain receipt. The windfall is not merely financial; it’s metaphysical. Trump has always understood the deepest truth of our era, that reality itself is negotiable, that value can be willed into being through sheer repetition and spectacle, that the emperor’s new clothes are, in fact, NFTs. And so the billions accumulate, vast and glistening, while the rest of us shuffle along, pretending the system still makes sense. The numbers are staggering, yes, but they are also inevitable. In the kingdom of the spectacle, the spectacle always pays best.

One of Trump’s biggest hauls arrived when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates, those sleek, completely uncorrupt desert potentates with their petrodollars and air-conditioned megacities, swept in and devoured nearly half of the Trump family’s flagship crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. A transaction vast and lubricious, that 49% of the Trump company swallowed in one glistening gulp, the sort of deal that leaves the air thick with the smell of sand, oil, and newly minted digital nothing. Here is the Trump empire’s logic laid bare, the sacred line between foreign policy and private enterprise not just blurred but dissolved entirely into a warm, oozing colloid, like ink bleeding through the pages of some half-forgotten treaty. What is diplomacy, after all, if not another species of grift? What are sovereign states if not rival firms haggling over slices of the same spectral pie?

The sheikhs, lounging in their marble halls beneath artificial skies, extended their golden tentacles across the ocean and found the Trump organism already pulsing there, ready to be financially fertilised. World Liberty Financial: a name like a Trump Tower rendered in blockchain, a monument to the idea that freedom might be tokenised and sold back to you at a premium. In rushed the Emirati capital, vast and anonymous, buying not merely equity but proximity, access to the ear, the brand, the aura of the childlike King himself. A state actor purchases a chunk of the presidential bloodline’s latest alchemical scheme, and suddenly the republic’s foreign policy acquires the faint, unmistakable tang of family branding.

I suppose this is not corruption in the old, vulgar Tammany Hall or 1990’s Fianna Fáil sense. Corruption implies some shameful deviation from a norm. No: this is the norm ignored, a convergence of contempt for democracy and direct deposits to Trump’s bank accounts. The desert winds whispered through the smart contracts, petrodollars metastasised into crypto-tokens, and somewhere in the marbled halls of power an invisible ledger ticked upwards, vast and indifferent, while the rest of us were left to contemplate the sublime spectacle of Trump’s republic auctioning off its soul. There are no blurred lines here; no guardrails, no constitutional limits, they simply don't exist. The United States Constitution is incapable of holding an 80-year-old, corrupt child King to account. But the much vaunted media and political apparatuses are also unwilling or unable to do so. Why do you insist on calling yourselves a democracy?

Just as the great orange golem lurched back into the White House for the second time, like some half-forgotten revenant from a nightmare you thought you’d finally shaken off, a cabal of sleek emissaries from the Abu Dhabi royals, princes of petrodollars and absolute discretion, slipped into the shadows and inked a pact with the Trump bloodline. They were buying a forty-nine per cent slice of the family’s latest glittering grift: some half-baked cryptocurrency venture, still wet and larval, pulsing with the usual promises of infinite wealth conjured from pure vapour. Half a billion dollars for the privilege. Half of it up front, naturally, funnelling hundreds of millions straight into the sticky palms of Trump family entities, those sacred vessels that have never once encountered a dollar they didn’t immediately transmute into gold-plated golf courses, legal bills, or fresh veneers of self-regard. And then, with the straightest of faces and the oiliest of voices, we are solemnly asked to believe that none of it has the slightest thing to do with anything else. One is a perfectly ordinary private transaction between consenting billionaires; the other is high statesmanship, visionary partnership, the noble sharing of tomorrow’s technology between trusted allies. Pure coincidence, mere happenstance, the sort of thing that occurs every day in a world governed by invisible and benevolent market forces. Sure, it’s not like Trump has done this before.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, two great throbbing organs of late-imperial capital, signed a grand covenant during Donald Trump’s ceremonial victory lap through the Middle East last year. The Gulf petro-monarchy, already swimming in black gold and sovereign wealth, would erect the largest artificial intelligence campus anywhere outside the United States itself. A gleaming necropolis of servers and silicon, humming in the desert heat like some colossal, half-sentient djinn newly unbound by tech. One of several such deals, each more lubricated than the last, all of them dripping with the promise of synergy, innovation, and other such glittering euphemisms for raw, unaccountable power. It was just a coincidence that the UAE bought a 49% share in the Trump families crytpo thimblerig while the UAE got access to the most coveted hardware in tech. Behold the true circuitry of our age: while the Trump clan quietly pockets its crypto tithe from Abu Dhabi princelings, the same hands are busy wiring the future itself into the emirates’ sun-blasted soil. Artificial intelligence, not the tame, helpful kind that writes your emails or generates pictures of cats in top hats, but the real thing, the god-machine, the thing that dreams in mathematics and hungers for dominion, will now have its grandest extraterritorial temple rising amid the dunes of the UAE. A campus vast enough to swallow entire cities of data, tended by those who already understand that sovereignty in the twenty-first century belongs not to nations but to whoever controls the largest cluster of GPUs in data centres.

We are invited to admire the scenery while the transaction completes. The orange showman jets between golden palaces, signing papers that will outlive every constitution ever written. The servers will blink awake in the desert. The blockchain will slither. And somewhere, in air-conditioned boardrooms where the future is priced to the nearest decimal, men in immaculate robes and men in red ties will shake hands over the corpse of whatever used to be called the public interest. Nothing to see here. Move along. The age of miracles is upon us, and it smells of server coolant and crude oil.

It gets worse…….

The New York Times is reporting that nearly a Million Investors Lost a Total of $3.8 Billion on Trumpcoin. Stop laughing down the back! Nearly one million souls, devout Trump followers, freshly converted into crypto investors, wide-eyed pilgrims of the digital gold rush/scam, have lost money. According to Nansen, the cryptocurrency analytics firm that moves through blockchain ledgers like a medieval scribe through illuminated manuscripts, the collective wounds amount to some $3.81 billion in losses for the Trump zealots. A hecatomb of small fortunes, pension scraps, stimulus cheques, and desperate savings, all vaporised into the desert air. One million individual tragedies, each no doubt accompanied by its own private howl of betrayal, now reduced to a single clean, horrifying number. This audit arrives in the same week that President Trump, with the serene satisfaction of a man who has never once been on the losing side of a deal, signed his annual financial disclosure. There it was, glowing like a sacred relic: a cool $636 million payout from the very same memecoin venture. Part of a broader harvest of at least $2.2 billion reaped from his various business undertakings in 2025 alone. While the faithful bled out in the comments section of Truth Social, their saviour was quietly counting his shekels in the counting-house. The token is down roughly 97.7% from its all-time high of $75.35; it is currently trading in the $1.69 – $1.87 price range. How did they think this would go? Have these people not heard of Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Bookings and Trump Casinos? Even I, in the boondocks of rural Ireland, had heard of all those scams.

The odds, ya see, were never in doubt. This was never a game of chance; it was the extraction from the gullible, the naive, the sucker, the imbecile, dressed up as populist prophecy, “we’re going to the moon”. Trump profited whether his glittering digital token rose like a phoenix or came down like Icarus on a bad acid trip. Every frantic trade, every desperate bag-holder’s sale, every fresh convert FOMO-ing in at the top generated a little skim, a little toll, a little cream for the house. He urged them on, of course, hammering the coin day after day from his bespoke digital pulpit on Truth Social, that great roaring agora of the aggrieved. “Buy my coin, folks, it’s going to the moon, believe me, tremendous gains, the best gains.” And they did. They always buy into him.

And so the question hangs in the air like the stench of something long dead and still twitching: how, precisely, is the President of the United States permitted to fleece nearly a million of his own worshippers out of nearly four billion dollars while still squatting in the Oval Office? Where, in this great creaking machine of parchment and precedent, is the mechanism that was supposed to prevent a man from turning the highest office in the land into a private slot machine, one that pays out only to the house?

We are invited, once again, to consult the noble words in the sacred texts. The Constitution, that brittle old scroll of Enlightenment optimism, that yellowing map drawn by men who had never imagined a world in which power could be converted into memecoins at the speed of light. It speaks of high crimes and misdemeanours, of impeachment, the tyranny of unaccountable Kings, and removal, of the careful separation of the person from the office. It does not, it turns out, contain a single clause that says “thou shalt not launch a speculative digital con token from the Resolute Desk and then profit obscenely from every desperate trade made by thy followers.” The framers, bless their powdered wigs, simply never thought to forbid the President from running a casino in which the chips are faith itself and the house edge is enforced by presidential tweet.

The laws are there, of course. Emoluments clauses, conflict-of-interest statutes, campaign-finance rules, the entire baroque scaffolding of ethics regulations meant to keep the Republic from devolving into a straightforward kleptocracy. They exist. They are enforced, from time to time, against lesser mortals. But they have developed a curious, almost gymnastic flexibility when applied to a man who has already demonstrated that the institutions are unwilling or unable to treat that despicable current custodian of what is meant to be a great democracy as subject to them. The guardrails, those famous guardrails, have been revealed as little more than painted lines on a fence that has already collapsed into the ravine. They look impressive from a distance. Up close, they are revealed to be suggestions, traditions, norms, things that only function if everyone agrees to pretend they still matter.

What remains is the raw fact of power. A President who can command the attention of tens of millions at any hour of the day, who can transmute that attention into trading volume on a token he himself controls, who can then collect fees on every transaction while the price gyrates according to his own caprice or the caprice of his algorithmically amplified followers. Some would argue it’s the logical endpoint of a system that has spent decades hollowing itself out in the name of “disruption” and “innovation.” The Constitution of the U.S.A was never designed to withstand a reality in which the head of state could become, simultaneously, a reality-television character, a brand, and the operator of a global pump-and-dump scheme. It assumes a certain baseline of shame, a certain residual attachment to the idea that public office should be a noble thing and not merely another revenue stream for a reality TV star.

So the answer, such as it is, is that he is allowed because the constitutional machinery that was supposed to stop him has already been captured, or exhausted, or rendered something decorative. The laws still exist on paper. The regulations gather dust on the shelves. The guardrails still stand, rusting gently in the toxic glow of Trump’s republic. But the laws no longer bind. They no longer guard. They have become artefacts, like the marble columns in a building from a bygone age that has long since been converted into a casino. And inside that casino, the lights stay on, the chips keep changing hands, and the man at the centre table keeps smiling, because the house, this time, really does always win.

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The latest episode of is out, where Vince and I discuss, amongst other things, an immigrant Mayor’s very shady timeline. Trump’s Crypto Con and America 250, and why Ireland does not have an Independence Day.

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Jeffrey Donaldson, the former Member of Parliament and knight of the realm no less, is now a convicted child rapist. On Monday, a jury at Newry Crown Court found him guilty on all eighteen counts: one of rape,…

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Belfast was once the kind of place where threats to kill were not rhetoric but as reliable as the local weather reports. You said the words, and the sky immediately began to turn black. By nightfall, the pavements would be wearing someone else’s blood like an old coat. A man might mutter words in a bar, over a cold Guinness and even colder eyes, and the sentence would already be halfway to its location in the back of one of Belfast’s famous black taxis or the entryway of a target’s semi-detached house. No gap, no polite having to think about it. The threat was rarely a warning but more like a future booking of some sort. The murder had the discourteous inevitability of Irish rain. That was the old grammar of Belfast City: subject, verb, object, corpse. You might even get a few of the wee pretend soldiers in balaclavas fire some shots over yer coffin. It was such a regular thing in Belfast, you could set your watch by it. There’d be something incomplete if some atrocity were absent from the daly news bulletins. Now the same murderous intent out of a Sudanese man and the whole apparatus of modern astonishment whirrs into life, headlines, hashtags, flaming buses, as if the city had forgotten its once native tongue and was scandalised to hear it spoken again by a stranger.

The video, of course, was everywhere: grainy, intimate, shocking in its brutality, the blade rising and falling like a question that never quite receives an answer. Why? Within hours, the social media accounts, those tireless merchants of recycled terror and monetised panic, had summoned their digital levée en masse. Come out, they said. Defend yourselves. As if Belfast had ever needed encouragement to tear itself apart. And so the process of The Troubles repeats: a single act of horror is alchemised into collective permission to revert to form the addlepated international media. One foreign blade becomes proof of an invading horde; one night of flaming bins becomes proof of righteous native fury. The city, already exhausted by its own past, finds itself performing the future that was promised to it by every algorithm and every demagogue with a social media account. Masked men torching public transport in the name of civilisation. This is not politics, not really. It is closer to a weather event: low-pressure systems of resentment, drifting in from the X, META, Telegram, colliding with the local atmosphere thick with old and unresolved grievances, and producing the same predictable sectarian storm. A man tries to behead another. The footage circulates like a virus. The streets answer in fire and hatred. Tomorrow, there will be condemnations, inquiries, and solemn editorials about “community tensions.” It’s Belfast, we’ve been here before.

Hundreds of masked men moved from street to street in North Belfast like a single black centipede of destruction, bottles and bricks clutched in one hand, mobile phone in the other, the way other people might carry the shopping. “Foreigners out,” they chanted and other racial slurs. I had a sense of Deja Vu watching it, glued to the voyeurism on social media and Sky News with the rest of the world. Mobs moved door-to-door like the census-takers from hell, knocking, kicking, peering through letterboxes for the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong accent, anything that didn’t fit the narrow, furious grammar of North Belfast belonging. A syllable out of place, and the petrol bomb was already in flight; a name that tasted foreign, and the petrol was already dreaming of flame. They were not rioting so much as performing a grotesque audit of the street, ticking boxes in blood and broken glass. We’ve seen this before in the mid-90’s.

They kicked over bins and set them dancing with flame, hammered on more doors and put their boots through windows with the brisk efficiency of men who had done this before, or at least had taken instruction from social media. Numerous cars went up. Petrol or lighter or pure communal will had already begun its work when a woman burst from her front door and announced, with the weary authority of someone stating a known fact, that the vehicle belonged to a local, not a foreigner. The mob paused, the flames thought twice, and the car was spared. In that small, pathetic moment, the entire farce revealed itself: the rioters were not burning the abstract idea of the outsider attempting murder, so much as performing a grim, meticulous audit of belonging. Wrong postcode, wrong accent, wrong skin. correct car. Proceed to the next target.

Our screens were filled with it, as they always do these days, shaky clips of people spilling out of their houses into the Belfast night, coats thrown over pyjamas, children clutched like precious brown parcels, while the flames behind them licked higher and turned the ordinary windows into a screaming béal na péiste. Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue, the mental health nurse to Northern Ireland’s schizophrenia, logged sixty-two separate incidents, sixty-two little infernos blooming across the map like measles on a child’s skin. Light the match, film the flight, upload the panic. Sixty-two times over, the old Belfast streets rehearsed their latest shame: ordinary doors opening not into safety but onto the ancient, patient hunger that is probably your neighbour. We’ve seen this before. Other families in other countries, Bosnia, Rwanda and other dark places that have slipped from the conscience. Even if the Belfast violence is diminished compared to the horrors of the past, it’s still the same playbook.

In 1994, over eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus were hacked, shot, burned, and clubbed to death in the space of three months. Among the architects of this abattoir was a Georges Ruggiu, the only foreigner ever hauled before the UN court for his part in the genocidal Rwandan hate. He sat behind a microphone at what the world soon learned to call “hate radio,” a cacodemonic little radio station that spent its days spraying incitement like cheap pesticide: names, addresses, instructions, the daily worship of extermination. While the machetes rose and fell outside, he spoke in calm, professional tones, as if reading the weather or the football scores. Kill them. Kill them all. They are cockroaches. They are snakes.

The accents are different, of course, the medium is much faster, but the rhetoric is the same. Over the past few days, foreign voices, accents from London, from America, from Russia, from the glowing bowels of social media channels and livestreams, have poured the same thin, venomous syrup into Belfast’s ears in recent days. They do not need radio instructions; they have algorithms. They do not broadcast from Belfast but from bedrooms and studios thousands of miles away, yet the message arrives crisp and urgent on your devices: here are the addresses, here are the targets, here is the enemy. Foreigners out. Burn it. Defend yourselves. They speak with the same professional calm Ruggiu once used, the detached reasonableness of men who will not have to smell the smoke or step over the broken glass. Streets trend, clips loop, outrage is farmed, harvested and recycled before the first bin is even lit. A single attempted murder becomes epidemiological proof. A neighbourhood becomes an occupied zone. The foreigners in Belfast are not merely present; they are, according to these distant inciters, an existential pestilence requiring the remedy of past centuries. The radios have shrunk to pocket size, and the hate has gone digital. We’ve been here before, it is identical: an outsider telling the locals who deserves to live on their street, who deserves the flame, who is a cockroach and who is not. Only the accents change. The pogrom is more real now, more photogenic, better documented. And somewhere in the background, the knife will still be falling, endlessly, in loops, feeding the next cycle before this one has even cooled. Belfast keeps burning the same bus, over and over again. Only the passengers change.

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In Aughinish, they take the good earth of Limerick, mix it and subject it to a kind of violence: heat, chemistry, vast clanking machinery, the whole groaning of industrial progress. What emerges is no longer soil but something redder, more hostile, a powder fine as Martian regolith, the spent entrails of bauxite transmuted into alumina, with the toxic remainder that refuses to be banished. Like The Curse of St. Munchin, the locals are incapable of breaking the negative hold this particular curse has on the economy and environment. Aughinish, one can’t help but feel that it is Ireland’s truest claimant to the title of most polluted bréanlach: not some urban Dublin hellscape or forgotten midlands bog, but this roaring, humming monument to human consumption, destruction and extraction, where the ground itself has been flayed and remade in the image of the red planet or the blood-soaked fields of Eastern Ukraine.

As far back as the 1990s, local farmers were reporting mysterious livestock deaths and human health problems. And yet the Janus-faced ones, some of those supple politicians with their environmental piety and their self-regarding smiles, look upon it all and find nothing to trouble their conscience. There was a proposed Liquid gas terminal recently. Monstrous. An outrage against the environment in the area. The sacred estuaries and farmland must be protected, and the future generations shielded from the invisible hand of fossil capital that destroys the land. But this? This sprawling, rust-stained necropolis of red mud and heavy cancerous metals, this ongoing haemorrhage of poison into the Shannon and the surrounding farmland? By all means, let it run. Let the chimneys cough their poisonous toxins. Let the spoil heaps grow. The contradiction is so naked it barely deserves the name of hypocrisy; what they don’t teach you in politics school is that this is how political power arranges its tolerances. Some desecrations wear the right slogans and have the vibe du jour. Others do not. The next time an Irish politician talks about being for the environment or how they are against solar panels on farms, ask them why they have not tried to stop the highly visible polluting and desecration of the land around Aughinish.

Once manufactured and its excrement deposited, Aughinish alumina is loaded onto ships, which sail up the grey Atlantic, past the watchful ghosts of the British Empire, into the Baltic maw of a nation that is ontologically evil. This is how the world actually works, of course. Not in the clean abstractions of sanctions lists or think-tank white papers, but in these grubby chains of supply: bauxite dug by underpaid hands or slaves, as they used to be called, in the likes of Guinea and Brazil. It is refined in Ireland under EU environmental trade credits and tax arrangements that would make a medieval cardinal blush, shipped to smelters in Siberia or the Urals, extruded into metal, filled with explosives and electronics, and finally hurled, at enormous expense, into the bodies of Ukrainian civilians. Friedrich Engels, in 1845, called this “social murder”; I prefer the term “murder capitalism”. Lots of people die in this logistics chain and similar other murder manufacturing supply chains around Europe. “Murder capitalism” is something that is utterly barbaric and reprehensible, which is allowed to happen so jobs can be saved in somewhere like Limerick. It is always Western countries where the jobs have to be kept at the expense of other people’s lives. People measure how far a society has come in GDP terms or GNP terms. Quite frankly, it should probably be measured by how many jobs your country has saved by letting people in other countries die. The mirror I’m holding up might appear somewhat uncomfortable right now….Some people call it Realpolitik, I suppose.

But think about it. Somewhere in the verdant damp of the Foynes Estuary in County Limerick, under the low grey Irish sky that would remind you of a sullen politician like it’s apologising for something, great war-enabling refineries churn away. How is that neutrality? Frank McCourt said in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes, “Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.” Similar could be said of the Irish Government’s reputation for piety when it comes to talking about Ireland being “strictly neutral”.

Ireland’s so-called “military neutrality” is one of those polite fictions that the Irish state clings to like a drowning man to a life raft made of turf. It’s not neutrality; it’s more like a cosplay, a tricolour-waving ritual that lets the country pretend it’s still the plucky underdog of Europe while quietly feeding a genocidal Russian war machine on the other side of the continent. In the first quarter of 2026, eighty-three per cent of Ireland’s alumina exports went straight to Russia. Not some vague “neutral” transaction, something for the ledgers but the raw materials of missiles and shells, the metallic marrow of a war of aggression. Ukrainian children are being shredded by the consequences of the Irish State, no matter how much we bleat about our neutrality. Alumina out of Ireland, into Russian smelters, out as components for the artillery that’s been grinding down Ukraine and beyond. The government knows. Of course it knows. But knowledge at those latitudes is a flexible thing. It bends around profits the way a medieval scholastic bends Scripture around whatever earthly vice needs theological cover. They’ll condemn the invasion in the Dáil with all the fire of a damp match, then sign off on the next 14 shipments to St Petersburg every month to fuel the Russian war machine, with the quiet satisfaction of men who understand how the world really works. This isn’t neutrality. It’s the oldest story in the book: the small country that sells its soul in instalments, telling itself each time that the price was worth it, that history will forgive the compromise. The compromise here is that on one hand, Ireland has taken in 80,000 Ukrainian refugees, but on the other hand, we’re enabling the tools of Russia’s war machine that cause those people to flee to Ireland.

And yet the outrage is exquisitely selective from some parts. We are to believe that this particular case is a scandal, a moral failure of Dublin and not the E.U. Ireland is not alone. In Switzerland, vast rivers of components, machine tools, dual-use chemicals, and outright weapons-grade materiel are flowing into the conflict daily from that famously neutral country. STMicroelectronics, a company with facilities in France and Italy were found most frequently in Russian weapons. A Dutch company, NXP, has had its components discovered in drones, ballistic and cruise missiles and communications equipment. A German company, Infineon Technologies, a spin-off of Siemens, has components regularly found in Russian weaponry. Rivers of silicon and steel snaking their way eastward. The ingredients of war being imported from every direction are merely the regrettable necessities of geopolitics. The material flows. The missiles fly. Civilians die.

The Aughinish Trap

Irish politicians and the European Commission stand before us with solemn faces, hands clasped piously over their green hearts, and declare with perfect bureaucratic calm: there are, at this time, no sanctions upon Aughinish Alumina. Nothing to see here. Just a little refinery in Limerick, humming away, cheerfully shipping thousands of tonnes of alumina off to St Petersburg, where it will no doubt find its way into the fuselages of missiles and the shells that rain down on Ukrainian cities. When politicians say they have no evidence of Aughinish alumina finding its way into Russian weapons, what do they think they are making with it? Tinfoil hats? Its owner? Oleg Deripaska, Putin’s favourite oligarch, is a man already sanctioned by the EU, the UK, the US, Australia, and Canada. A walking embodiment of Kremlin kleptocracy. But sanctions? For us? Perish the thought. That would be self-defeating, you see. Jobs. Supply chains. The sacred European economy. One mustn’t be hasty. Irish politicians from all political parties have been pouring honey in to journlists ears, whispering - think of the job losses…..

Meanwhile, the same Irish politicans strides forth like a moral colossus, sleeves rolled up, ready to pass the Occupied Territories Bill. This noble piece of legislation will ban Irish trade with goods and services from illegal Israeli settlements. How virtuous! How consistent with international law! How loudly we shall clap ourselves on the back for refusing to sully our hands with the produce of illegal occupation.

But the Occupied Territories Bill will likely cost Ireland far more jobs than stopping Aughinish Alumina from exporting a vital war material component to Russia. 38 U.S. states have anti-boycott legislation, which were introduced to protect Israel. The Taoiseach himself said last week that 250,000 jobs were at stake.

This is the trap, sprung wide open. Find us the Irish politician brave enough, or cynical enough, to stand in our parliment and say, with a straight face: “We must accept job losses to sanction this illegal occupation, because it is righteous and symbolic, but not that occupation. That one pays wages in Limerick, feeds the grid, and keeps the European machine humming. There’s a word for that. The mind boogles at the grandeur of it. Here is Ireland that spent centuries under foreign occupation itself, now lecturing the world on the sanctity of other people’s lands, while quietly ensuring that its own ports and factories keep the war machine of a nuclear aggressor well-oiled and humming. Oleg Deripaska’s alumina flows. The profits accrue. The alumina becomes aluminium becomes drones becomes death.

This is not foreign policy, nor is it statesmanship; it is moral arbitrage. Ireland, land of centuries under occupation, now expertly weighing which occupations deserve the lash. It’s a grotesque little morality play in which Ireland casts itself as the conscience of Europe, while its chimneys in Limerick belch out the raw materials of someone else’s slaughter, and our farmland resembles the killing fields of Ukraine that we help turn blood red. The hypocrisy isn’t hidden; it’s a badge worn proudly, murder capitalism it reads. A mark of a truly industrial nation. But Ireland isn’t to blame here. The market, that great blind idiot god, continues its eternal work of turning dirt into death and death into dividends. Aughinish Alumina is not an outlier; it’s the same system that sells us electric cars while strip-mining Congo for cobalt, that lectures us on net zero while fuelling wars with the refined products of the earth.

Craft, and not sorrow, is seen in a hypocrite's tears.

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But none of this happens without money. Posters, leaflets, and, quaintly enough, newspaper advertising all cost money. Online spending, which used to be a factor in electioneering budgets, is now confined to the dark reaches of the internet since META banned political advertising on its platforms in Europe.

Liz Carolan, over on The Briefing, recently posted about a little-known new EU regulation (TTPA), which requires European Union political parties to disclose information on their advertising expenditures. There’s a darkly amusing caveat here: the political parties are “self-reporting” their self-indulgence. Stop laughing down the back.

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There is a particular kind of insult reserved for the victims of I.R.A history: not the violence itself, but the rewriting that follows. The careful sanding down of brutality into something more palatable. The transformation of gunmen into “statesmen,” of wanton murderers into “peacemakers,” of the indefensible into something to be quietly understood, and then forgotten.

Eamon Ryan cannot be forgotten. And that is precisely the problem for Sinn Féin.

On an August day in 1979, in a small AIB bank in Tramore, a young civil servant lay face down on the floor. He was unarmed. He was no threat. He was not part of any “struggle.” He was there with his three-year-old son. He was shot at point-blank range anyway. Let’s be clear about what that was. Not collateral damage. Not a tragic misfortune. Not the blurred edge of conflict where responsibility becomes murky. A vicious, unwarranted murder.

Eamon Ryan was 32, not old, not really. Barely old enough to have assembled a proper past, let alone the future that was so casually cancelled on a grey morning in Tramore. Thirty-two: the age at which a man is still young enough to believe the world might yet be gentle, yet old enough to understand that gentleness is a privilege rarely extended to civil servants who happen to be in the wrong bank at the wrong time. He was shot dead by members of the Sinn Féin/IRA during a bank robbery in Co. Waterford. A civil servant, which is to say he might have spent his days pushing paper across desks in exchange for the modest, unheroic dignity of an ordinary life. No flags, no anthems, no grand revolutionary destiny, just the small mercies of routine, a wage packet, a wife waiting at home. That life ended with the usual IRA brutality: sudden, loud, and final. A bullet balancing the accounts of someone else’s glorious struggle. He left behind Bernadette, his wife, and two children, Peter and Dorothy. Names that now carry the weight of a permanent subtraction. Two small people handed a sentence far crueller than any handed down by the courts: they would grow up circling the hole where their father should have been, learning early that the world is capable of tearing a man out of existence in front of you and then expecting you to carry on as though the shape of him hadn’t been violently excised from the family forever. Eamon Ryan was an innocent man executed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is the part that resists sanitisation. The part that cannot be folded neatly into the language of “struggle” or “cause.” Because whatever else was happening in Ireland at the time, whatever political narratives were constructed before or after, this was something brutally simple: an unarmed man, executed on the floor of a bank, in front of his son.

After the shot was fired, he was kicked as he lay dying. His three-year-old child beside him.

This is the reality that sits behind the language, the euphemisms, the speeches, the carefully stage-managed public memory. Because while some now speak in the tones of reconciliation and statesmanship, and sure isn’t he a grand lad that he swapped the bullets for the ballot. The facts remain stubbornly unpolished. The Sinn Féin/IRA organisation carried out acts like this. Not rarely. Not accidentally. But as part of a campaign in which civilians were expendable.

And yet, decades later, those involved in the murder are honoured. Celebrated. Applauded for their “service.” Their pasts softened into phrases like “service” and “commitment,” their roles reframed within a broader story that they demand you must understand and venerate said “service”

Service to what, exactly?

A chair unfilled. A life interrupted. Children raised with stories instead of a father. A wife who accepted a university degree on behalf of a man who would never receive it himself. A sister who cannot, and will not, “get over it,” because grief does not obey political timetables. No service to his widow, who buried her husband and raised their children alone. Not to the three-year-old boy who stood close enough to witness his brutal murder. Not to a family that has waited, year after year, not for vengeance, but for something far more basic: acknowledgement, explanation, anything at all, that never quite comes.

Instead, they are told to move on. “The struggle”, “the cause”, or other bullshit euphemisms are used to justify what was, in some cases, like this, a gratuitous murder. Move on, from what? From the image of a man shot on the ground? From a childhood defined by absence? From a life cut short in the most deliberate way imaginable? One feels a certain vertiginous disgust at the smoothness of the transition from murderer to “community activist”. Sinn Féin has a lot of them.

To add insult to injury: there’s the expectation that grief should have an expiry date, that memory should yield to political convenience. That the victims of violence should quietly step aside while those connected to it are recast as architects of peace, their pasts selectively edited to suit the present. From the image of a man shot on the ground? Not because it is merely inconvenient, after all, inconvenience is a small thing, the sort of petty embarrassment that can be waved away with a press release and another slogan. No. They want it to vanish because the public still sees the monsters moving among them, smiling for the cameras, holding leaflets, shaking hands in Dublin doorways. The past is not just some dusty archive; it is a man, bleeding out while his three-year-old son watches. It is Eamonn Nolan, trigger finger now politely folded around a canvassing clipboard, the same man who once taught a child the final lesson in revolutionary pedagogy. The laundering of blood into ballot papers.

Because the truth is this: you cannot build a credible narrative of peace on a foundation of evasion. You cannot ask an island to forget while refusing to fully reckon with its past. And you cannot claim the authority of a peacemaker while sidestepping the moral weight of what was done in the name of “the cause”

Eamon Ryan’s story deserves to be told precisely because it resists being absorbed into another Sinn Féin/IRA myth. It is too stark. Too human. Too unforgiving of spin. The Troubles did not end; they simply learned to speak in focus-grouped soundbites and pose for photographs beside Sinn Féin election candidates. The child who watched his father die is still out there somewhere, carrying a memory that no by-election flyer can erase. Meanwhile, Eamonn Nolan smiles for the camera, doing his bit for the movement. Progress, they call it.

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How noble it must feel for the WSJ, perched atop that $94,400-per-head Olympus, peering down at the sad, stagnant Europeans shuffling about in our $65,000 GDP misery (Ireland’s is $130k), wondering why we haven’t yet prostrated ourselves before the altar of hyper capitalism enlightenment. The continent’s great existential question, according to the latest oracle from the Wall Street Journal, is this: when will we deluded welfare addicts in Europe finally shake off our socialist fever-dream and admit how wretchedly poor we are? When will we do the decent, grown-up thing and start fixing our addicction, by which, one presumes, the article means flinging the doors open to more venture capital, slashing away at sick days and annual leave like a Puritan with a riding crop, and embracing the American sacrament of drowning in medical debt while the bills pile up like funeral wreaths on the steps of our recently repossessed homes. All this, naturally, while organising our entire civilisation around the rigid worship of some two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old words, those brittle constitutional relics, as though they were handed down on Sinai rather than drafted by a committee of slave-owning Enlightenment gentlemen who never had to worry about waiting lists or insulin prices.

How illuminating of the Wall Street Journal. How infinitely generous of them, these high priests of the Dow Jones and the leveraged buyout, to descend from their ivory towers and offer us their guiding hand on the path to salvation, to show us poor, benighted Europeans the way out of our childish welfare garden and into the bright, sunlit uplands of proper American adulthood, where venture capital flows like holy water and bankruptcy is just another character-building sacrament.

The true genius of the American capitalist model, that holy place of greed is good in what used to pass for Freedom and liberty, (something we also have in abundance in Europe), is this: one morning you wake with a small, conspiratorial lump nestling under your skin, a reminder of your own mortality, and the republic responds not with pity, empathy or healing, but with paperwork. You will lie on a hospital bed in some fluorescent hallway for fourteen hours, a modern Stations of the Cross, while a nurse whose eyes have already seen too many deaths simply because people are poor, presses a single painkiller into your palm as if it were the last consecrated host. Then the bill arrives, twelve thousand dollars, itemised with the cold poetry of the damned, and your credit score collapses like a subprime mortgage in 2008. Perhaps you will have to pimp the children out to OnlyFans, or negotiate with debt collection agencies who speak in the serene, unhurried tones of minor demons who know they own your soul anyway.

Why should the hospital keep you alive when the same money might be deployed more efficiently in a stock buyback? A financial ritual by which capital eats its own tail and grows fatter. The hospital is not a place of healing; it is a derivatives market with worse lighting. If you can’t pay, they will come for the house, naturally. They always do. Congratulations: you are now bankrupt, or at least performing the contemporary American sacrament of crowdfunding your own continued existence while some insurance adjuster, a minor functionary of Moloch, explains with exquisite bureaucratic tenderness that your pre-existing condition has got to do with being human and your current plan falls outside the terms of the covenant. You know what Europe doesn’t do? It doesn’t hand you a bill for $40,000 because you gave birth. It doesn’t send bounty hunters after you for an MRI; we commit the vulgar indecency of simply treating you. No credit check. No GoFundMe interlude. No moral lecture about personal responsibility. As if cancer cares how hard you work. In Europe, we simply try to fix what is broken, like barbarians who have never heard of shareholder value. One almost blushes at the primitivism of it all. We, poor deluded things, still clinging to our outdated social model, as every American knows, deliver “terrible health outcomes” by the cruel and perfidious method of not bankrupting people. I’m struggling to explain why every country in Western Europe has a higher life expectency higher than the U.S.A.

In America, you don’t have to worry about stagnation. You might simply stop. Your job can vanish overnight, no notice, no ceremony, your boss can fire you between bites of his third avocado toast because the quarterly numbers demanded a blood sacrifice and the immediate evaporation of your healthcare, along with your income. That’s just pure market poetry: you’re valuable until you’re not, at which point, enjoy the exciting new career path of “figuring it out before eviction.” Which it does, of course. In America, corporations are treated more like people. Not like you or I, with our inconvenient needs and organs, but better: immortal, tireless, and exquisitely protected. They do not get sick, they do not age, and they certainly do not require public healthcare or food stamps. Instead, they are free to accumulate, expand, and occasionally shed their human appendages when efficiency demands it. It’s a system of remarkable dynamism: the trapdoor beneath your feet is always well-oiled.

As for the minimum wage! Or rather, the thrilling absence of anything resembling a floor in large swathes of the service economy that the WSJ calls - a price floor that distorts labour-clearing mechanisms. I don’t know what that means exactly, but nothing builds character quite like working three jobs, sleeping four hours a night, and still qualifying for food stamps while your employer posts record profits. You hustle, you grind, while still paying off the interest on your student loans from 2004. That’s prosperity, baby. That’s trickle-down economics. In Europe, we have employment protections that prevent the sacred right to be ghosted by your livelihood. We even have the nerve to tax the wealthy at rates that might mildly inconvenience a hedge fund. All the while, Europe’s per-capita GDP stubbornly refuses to match the output of people who measure national success by how many politicians tech moguls can buy.

And then there is the Constitution, that visionary, beautifully written, sacred scrap of vellum from 1776, clutched to the American breast like the Shroud of Turin dipped in gun oil. A document penned by bewigged Virginia planters and slave owners who still thought lightning was a Benjamin Franklin parlour trick, something he did for laughs at dinner parties. That document is now treated as the literal, inerrant Word of a God who clearly favoured slave owners over people and, through feats of judicial divinity and alchemy that no medieval scholastic could match, that corporations have more rights than people, vast, soulless, immortal persons with an inalienable right to sluice unlimited cash into the Trumpian oligarchy, that some folk still insist on calling democracy. It is not a constitution anymore; it is a 250-year-old suicide pact written in the language of liberty, wrapped in a flag, and recited like a protective incantation against the modern terrors of affordable healthcare and employment rights. Where the theology of one-man - one-vote, do not have to compete with the vested interests of billionaires and gun lobbyists that are ok with children being murdered in schools, akin scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in civil war-ridden, sub-Saharan countries.

The USA cannot ban assault rifles, you see, because in 1776, militia men with muzzle-loading muskets thought a well-regulated militia might come in handy against future tyranny. How’s that working out against Trump and his attacks on the media and personal freedoms? The dead rule the living with the imperturbable tyranny of the unchanging. Meanwhile, over here in shabby, sclerotic Europe, forever being lectured on our moral poverty by some people whose idea of political philosophy is a bumper sticker, our laws tend to evolve. In Europe, we simply change the rules when the rules become irrational, chaotic, or dangerously absurd. We decided workers should not be chewed up and spat out. We decided, in moments of uncharacteristic lucidity, that the water coming out of the tap ought not to glow in the dark. We do these things because we are not chained by spectral plantation owners, not haunted by powdered wigs drifting through the halls of power like reproachful revenants. In Europe, we are allowed, however imperfectly, to be alive in our own era, so that legislation could be an act of collective self-defence instead of just another transaction in the great marketplace of political influence. How regressive of us. How déclassé we are in Europe for this political theology.

America, by contrast, prefers to be governed by its ancestors’ shopping list: a brittle - stained inventory of eighteenth-century neuroses, scratched out by a handful of bewigged Virginia planters and Massachusetts lawyers who genuinely believed they had nailed down the final, unalterable blueprint for human freedom before promptly going back to owning people. Even 250 years ago, a simply designed constitutional amuse-bouche for special interests. Plus ça change. And this, we are solemnly assured, without the merest flicker of irony or self-awareness, is freedom and liberty: the sacred and inalienable right to spend your entire life as a tenant in the crumbling intellectual boarding-house of dead men, powdered slave-owners, merchant princes, and provincial lawyers who thought they had solved the end of history once and for all. You may not redecorate. You may not move the furniture. You are forbidden, on pain of being called a tyrant or a liberty hater, even to notice that the roof needs new tiles, the wallpaper is peeling in long necrotic strips, and the foundations are quietly dissolving into the fetid corporate lobbyist swamp beneath. How very noble. How magnificently, heroically, asphyxiatingly free. Once your health insurance can cover the asphyxiation, of course. No one wants to die choking to death on liberty. Here in gloriously impoverished Europe, that would be considered quite uncouth.

The WSJ article warns that Europe’s welfare bliss will end when the money runs out. Fair enough. But perhaps the American model has its own collision coming, when enough people notice that being the richest country on paper doesn’t mean much if your “prosperity” is experienced as a constant low-level medical and financial terror, punctuated by thoughts and prayers from Republicans after the latest mass school shooting, who think the all too numerous deaths of innocent children at the hands of gun toting malcontents are the price of freedom. I genuinely do not understand how murdering children with guns gives you liberty and freedom? We have lots of liberty and freedom in Europe without our schools getting shot up.

Europeans may indeed register as marginally poorer on some bloodless GDP Excel spreadsheet, those glowing talismans of late stage-capitalist divination. When the body betrays us in its usual stupid, leaking, sickly way, we do not have to prostrate ourselves before the internet, palms outstretched, begging our colleagues who are one pink slip away from being unemployed also. The state steps in, empathy kicks in, and social welfare and healing are attempted by medical profesionals not avaricious financial institutions. That’s not stagnation or the word du jour among economists, stagflation. We do not have to crowdfund our continued existence like digital serfs rattling a metaphysical tin cup beneath the ambivalent gaze of strangers. We do not have to perform our suffering for shares on social media for GoFundMe transfers. How savagely Neanderthal of us.

Call it what you like about Europe: decline, decadence, managed poverty, demographic senescence, the slow euthanasia of old empires, whatever epithet flatters your flawed GDP spreadsheets this week. Some of us would still rather not live in a society whose highest purpose is the industrial manufacture of billionaires, a gleaming machine optimised to extract every last drop of blood, sweat and marrow from the many so that a vanishingly small number might own superyachts the size of small Irish towns.

Mississippi may indeed enjoy a higher nominal GDP per capita than Britain in the glittering fever-dreams of the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed section. Marvellous, deluded. And yet I will take the European model, imperfect, creaking, perpetually on the verge of fiscal infarction, over the sacred American right to declare bankruptcy because your child has leukaemia or got shot in school, to pass the hat among your neighbours so that the chemo might continue another round, to watch your life savings evaporate in the antiseptic waiting room of a for-profit hospital.

Keep clutching those highly deceptive little GDP-per-capita printouts, those sacred amulets of econometric voodoo, your trembling talismans raised against the unbearable stench of lived reality. We’ll be over here in Europe, in our still-breathing welfare states, quietly framing new laws so that a human being does not have to die in penury and shame for the unforgivable crime of falling ill, after their boss has already fired them for the even greater sin of not dragging their terminally-ravaged body into the office with sufficient neoliberal enthusiasm.

No GoFundMe campaigns. No choice between bankruptcy and burial. Just the dull, unglamorous machinery of civilisation trying, however imperfectly, to say: you are allowed to be sick without first being financially executed. How retrograde. How European. How almost obscenely humane.

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Paul Krugman has an article out today also, that thoroughly debunks the now-infamous WSJ article and argues that it is actually the USA which is poorer. Don’t take my word for it. The man is a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Paul Krugman

What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are?

The title of today’s post is a riff on a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal: “What happens when Europeans find out how poor they are?” The Journal’s management evidently liked that article, which revolved around the assertion that European economies are lagging far behind the U.S. A few days ago they published a…

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2 months ago · 1316 likes · 292 comments · Paul Krugman

We also did a podcast on the WSJ article.

The Atlantic Current

The Atlantic Current, Ep. 41: Poor Europeans And Bad Journalism

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal sparks a discussion on the relative wealth between Europe and the United States. Is the Continent really falling further behind? And why can’t everyone be like the United States? Plus why a key Irish civil servant needs to fly more, and how Tull and Vince are contributing to the destruction of the global media…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · The Atlantic Current

Ireland’s secret sauce, if we’re being honest, is a corporate tax rate so helpfully low it makes the rest of Europe mad with envy, bless our fiscally liberal little hearts. That, and an economic openness that borders on indecent. Nowadays, everyone agrees that a small island economy needs the global drawbridge down. However, back in the day (pre-IDA), Fianna Fáil and its bureaucratic allies in the civil service were intoxicated by protectionism, convinced that locking out imports would somehow spark an industrial revival. What arrived instead of an Irish Industrial Revolution was the old national reflex: departure. Not factories roaring into life, but suitcases snapping shut. Not smokestacks, but steamships. The great machinery of progress was replaced by a conveyor belt of people, funnelling steadily outward, mostly toward America. Across the water to Britain, anywhere that wasn’t here, which stubbornly remained itself.

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On Saturday night, beneath the anxious glitter of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, those marble halls thick with the brittle laughter of journalists who secretly despise their own sycophancy, Donald Trump was once again bundled offstage like a valuable prop in a play that refuses to end. Shots rang out, that distinct American timbre: equal parts frontier myth, constitutional onanism, and the low, idiot hum of a nation marinated in lead. Secret Service agents moved with the grim choreography of men who have rehearsed this dance too many times, bodies folding into practised geometry. Attendees, whose entire careers are spent narrating power from a safe remove, found themselves performing the oldest and most honest ritual available: crawling under tables, hearts hammering, suddenly mortal again. Trump, Melania, and Vance were extracted like sacred relics from a museum already on fire.

It is no longer an aberration. It is a pattern, or perhaps a genre.

America is a country that loves its presidents the way a moth loves a candle flame: with a fatal, fluttering stupidity. The office is draped in pomp and solemnity, but the real tradition, the genuine, unbroken thread of American political life, is the sound of a gun going off somewhere aimed at a president. Somebody, eventually, is always going to try to kill the president. It’s about the most American thing you can do, right up there with baseball or American Football. This is the genuine, unbroken thread of American political life. Not the Constitution, not the endless squabble over rights and liberties, but the quiet, patient expectation that somebody, eventually, is going to try to kill the president. It is practically a civic sacrament. The moth doesn’t hate the flame. It is simply compelled, wired by some idiot evolutionary logic to seek the brightest, hottest thing in the room and immolate itself against it. So too with the republic. The U.S.A. crowns its leaders in the language of destiny and then, with a kind of tender inevitability, begins loading the magazines. The gun is not an aberration. It is a love letter.

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy: four dead presidents, each one a small catastrophe in a different costume. Then the near-misses, the grazes, the failed attempts, the lunatics with grievances and pistols and some private theology of history. Teddy Roosevelt speaking with a bullet in his chest. FDR almost died before he even got the job. Truman woke up to gunfire outside Blair House and was, by all accounts, mostly irritated. Ford survived two women trying to murder him, and looked like he had developed an existential allergy to the office. Reagan was hit because a man wanted to impress an actress.

America does not merely have political violence. It has a political relationship to violence so intimate it can barely be distinguished from patriotism. The republic looks at itself and thinks that it ought to be stable, solemn, and permanent, and then immediately remembers it was built by men with guns and never really stopped being that. The president stands at the centre of the performance, smiling under the lights, while somewhere in the wings, history loads another round. The bullet misses most of the time. That is the most comforting thing that can be said about it. But “most of the time” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

In July 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump stood before a rally crowd when a shooter, elevated both physically and symbolically above the scene, opened fire. A man in the audience died. Others were wounded. Trump himself was grazed, a thin, almost theatrical wound to the ear, the perfect crimson rivulet down the cheek, in a way that cameras could understand. It set the political strategists grinning like wolves in the dark of our war-rooms, lips peeled back over teeth that had already tasted blood, because we knew, oh, we too knew well, what it means when a presidential candidate survives an assassination attempt. Trump raised a fist, shouted “Fight!”, and was carried away, already transformed into an icon, a living relic of American violence sanctified by proximity to death. Kamala didn’t stand a chance.

Two months later, in Florida, the threat was quieter but no less operatic. A rifle emerged from the foliage at his golf club, an AK-style weapon, fitted with a scope, accompanied by the strange accessories of modern violence: backpacks, a GoPro, the full pathetic regalia of the modern lone wolf, turning regicide into content. Trump was untouched. The man responsible would later be sentenced to life, his motivations dissolving into the usual slurry of grievance and delusion.

Then, in the wet grey throat of February 2026, another supplicant came crawling toward the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, a young man clutching a shotgun in one hand and a petrol canister in the other, piecing together his private apocalypse from the cheapest available materials. The Secret Service cut him down before the story could even swallow him whole. A brief, perfunctory violence. No spectacle. No cameras drinking deep. Just the wet pop of duty, his martyrdom stillborn. Trump was not even there.

And now this: another ballroom, another scattering of bodies, another reminder that proximity to power in America is always also proximity to violence. The same hotel where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, history repeating itself, not as farce exactly, but as something flatter, more procedural. Less shock, more expectation. Every aftermath begins as an outrage and ends as a familiar American genre: the security failure, the public panic, the rehearsed debate about motive, the solemn promises that this time things will be different. But the country never quite breaks the pattern because the pattern is baked into the spectacle. The presidency is an instrument for concentrating attention, and concentrated attention in America eventually attracts a gun. The office is not just powerful. It is visible, symbolic, and endlessly narrativised, all the things that make a person venerable to the national imagination and vulnerable to its ugliest impulses.

The strange thing is not that these events keep happening. It is how quickly they are absorbed. Each incident arrives with the weight of rupture and leaves as just another data point, another entry in the expanding archive of nearly catastrophic events. The presidency continues, the dinners resume, the headlines rearrange themselves. That is the part Americans prefer not to dwell on. They like the monuments, the biographies, the posthumous nobility. They like to imagine violence as an interruption to the system rather than one of its recurring outputs. But the republic has always lived with the possibility that someone, somewhere, will decide the ultimate end to a political argument is to pull the trigger. That is not a glitch in the design of the Republic. It is one of the design’s oldest features.

Gunfire, applause, evacuation. The rhythm holds.

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The Atlantic Current

The Atlantic Current, Ep. 38: 'The United States Is In A State Of Chaos'

Another assassination attempt on Donald Trump further inflames what Tull has long called an ongoing “cold civil war”. The instant explosion in conspiracy theories — now apparently the domain of both sides of the political divide — only adds to a sense that in America reality itself is fracturing. Vince charts an unlikely path for President Trump, while …

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3 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · The Atlantic Current

This is not the story of a one-off rebellion. It is a long feud, punctuated by bursts of public contempt, in which McGuinness repeatedly returns to the same accusation: Martin has built a party that mistakes control for competence, consultation for inconvenience, and loyalty for the measure of one’s political worth. The phrases change, but the complaint remains the same. It is the complaint of a man who thinks the party has become a machine for telling its own members what has already been decided.

2009–2010: the Cowen prehistory

Before Micheál Martin became the target, Brian Cowen was the weather system. In the wreckage of the financial crisis, McGuinness was part of the wider backbench muttering that accompanied Fianna Fáil’s collapse into self-loathing and electoral doom. The significance of this period is not that McGuinness made a single grand intervention, but that he was already there, already suspicious of leadership as performance, already treating party discipline as a useful fiction. The future feud with Martin did not begin from nowhere; it grew out of the party’s earlier collapse, along with the financial crash. From 2007 to 2009, in the lead-up to the crash, McGuinness served as a junior minister at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. After the crash, McGuinness was demoted when Cowen, eager to show he was acting decisively, reduced the number of junior ministers. I can’t recall whether McGuinness challenged the Fianna Fáil leadership during his years as a junior minister, but he did blame Calamity Coughlan for his demotion and said she had threatened to resign if he stayed in office. McGuinness survived the great Fianna Fáil 2011 general election extinction event, which is a testament to his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Fine line between contrarian and opportunist.

2014: “I want your job”

The first truly unmistakable crack in the wall came in April 2014. During a private meeting with Micheál Martin, reportedly about European election ambitions, McGuinness delivered the sort of sentence that sounds like it has been lifted from a gangster movie: “I want your job, I wanna be the leader.” There is something almost innocent in the bluntness of it. No laundering, no preamble, no fake collegiality. Just the raw, primitive, naked political ambition. The remark signalled that McGuinness was not merely complaining about the direction; he was imagining himself as the corrective action. He was looking at Martin and seeing not a leader but a placeholder.

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