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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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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a month 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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a month 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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2 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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Mar 23: “We had very good and productive talks with Iran.”
Mar 24: “We’re making progress.”
Mar 25: “They gave us a present, and the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.” Mar 26: “Make a deal, or we’ll just keep blowing them away.”
Mar 27: “We don’t have to be there for NATO.”
Mar 28: No major quote
Mar 29: Claimed talks were progressing
Mar 30: “Open the Strait of Hormuz immediately, or face devastating consequences.”
Mar 31: Claimed a deal was “very close” and that Iran would “do the right thing”
Apr 1: “We’ll see what happens very soon.”
Apr 2: Repeated that a deal was likely, while warning of continued strikes if not
Apr 3: “Something big is going to happen.”
Apr 4: Said Iran must comply “immediately” or face further consequences.
Apr 5: “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

There are modern political chronicles, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Fall of Saigon, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, etched into history as a testament to statesmen navigating the chaos of war with solemn precision. And then there is the March Madness of Donald Trump’s Iran “victory tour,” a month-long seminar in verbal delusion where foreign policy became something of a stand-up routine, with every press conference contradicting the previous one. Trump’s statements did not form a timeline so much as a spiral. I spiralled with him.

“We won the war,” Trump said on March 3rd, as if the Middle East had momentarily agreed to his proposal. It was abrupt, miraculous, almost scriptural, America stumbling into glory not through bloodshed, battle or sacrifice, but through sheer assertion of Trump’s delusional maunderings.

By March 7, the victory acquired a name: Iran. “We defeated Iran,” he declared, with all the authority of a man describing what he had for breakfast yesterday. But then came March 9, and suddenly, the war needed to start again. “We must attack Iran,” he demanded, undoing his own triumph, as if declaring some sort of victory were an engine that required constant fuel. Later that same day, he told the world, “The war is ending almost completely, and very beautifully,” a phrase that shimmered like a narcotic-induced hallucination. One imagines Pentagon officials, whiplashed and glassy-eyed, trying to translate the President’s wormhole of logic into an actionable memo.

By March 11, victory had been achieved “in the first hour,” but humility forbade him from saying so “too early.” Victory deferred, delayed, upcycled, recycled, whatever youre having yourself. March 12 brought semantic confusion: “We did win, but we haven’t won completely yet”. The same contradiction was rendered unholy by the theology of his own uncertainty. March 13: another victory announced; March 14: “Please help us.” America, like a gambler on the verge of ruin, is alternately triumphant and destitute, and asking for help from former friends.

By March 15, gratitude curdled into warning, If you don’t help us, I will certainly remember it. The President’s diplomacy took on the logic of an urban legend. March 16: “We don’t need any help.” Then, minutes later, a confession, “I was just testing to see who’s listening.” Then threats again: “If NATO doesn’t help, they will suffer something very bad.” The words had melted and reformed into a doom loop, every pronouncement somehow worse than the last. It was not a coherent language being spoken, but a language speaking itself. Like some ancient forgotten vernacular no one understood.

By St Patricks’s Day, Trump announced: “We neither need nor want NATO’s help,” and then, impossibly, “I don’t need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO.” Turns out he does. Foreign policy dissolved into solipsism: there was only his will, bouncing off the marble walls of his own rhetoric. Watching in stupidfied amazement, I was starting to wonder whether he was going to take credit for banishing the snakes from Ireland.

The Strait of Hormuz has become the stage upon which his solipsism played out. On March 18: “Our allies must cooperate in reopening it.” March 19: “US allies need to get a grip.” March 20: “NATO are cowards.” March 21: “We don’t need to open it.” A week later, no one knew whether the Strait existed at all, whether it had evaporated under the sheer friction of his contradictions.

March 22: “This is the last time. I will give Iran 48 hours.” Two breaths later: “Iran is Dead.” It was poetry of annihilation, not description but incantation, a man inventing death and destruction as a tool for emphasis.

On March 23, death became negotiation: “We had very good and productive talks.” A day later, “We’re making progress.” By March 25, the apocalypse had been monetised: “They gave us a present … worth a tremendous amount of money.” It was all happening at once: conquest, collapse, rebirth, sale. The war became a biblical shopping channel, where nations and souls were interchangeable goods. My own sanity was beginning to fray at this stage.

By March 26, he oscillated between negotiation and threat: “Make a deal, or we’ll keep blowing them away.” March 27: “We don’t have to be there for NATO.” The empire untethered. On March 29, progress again, illusory peace. But by March 30, the prophecy returned: “Open the Strait immediately, or face devastating consequences.” “Taco Trump”, the Iranian regime openly mocks Trump on social media via the medium of A.I. generated Lego movies. For the times we live in, diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power on social media.

Every utterance was a new creation myth. Trump spoke, and reality flickered accordingly. Journalists tried to catalogue his statements, unaware that the act of listing them had created a parallel timeline, another dimension, a phantom republic existing somewhere between war, peace and delusions. March 31, he whispered about a “deal that is very close.” April 1, “We’ll see what happens very soon,” a mantra for the waiting room of geo-politics. April 2, optimism and threat fused again, a “likely deal,” plus “continued strikes if not.” I have one thing in common with Trump: watching all this, my sanity has also abandoned me.

April 3: “Something big is going to happen.” The words glowed with anticipation but contained nothing. April 4: “Iran must comply immediately.” And then the grand descent, April 5: Profanity as divine revelation:

Perhaps, by then, his language had simply exhausted itself. Beneath the mask of rage was pure delusion, a man so entangled in his performance that a prayer and a murderous threat emerged in the same breath, indistinguishable. Surely he’s reaching the theological endpoint of his grandiose proclamations? Allies and enemies floating through his sentences like debris in orbit, rearranged at will. War was not a thing that happened, but a linguistic event, created, deleted, rebooted, all shouted into microphones while the world watches in astonishment. By this point, I’ve become my own apothecary, grinding down the days into liquids and draughts, administering them at regular intervals, pretending it’s treatment and not just another exquisite form of surrender to Trump’s aberrations. It almost reminds me of the great 2008 crash and Irish politicians making grand pronouncements about solvency when, as a country, we didn’t have two coppers in our back pocket. Political delusion isn’t some exotic American disease. Every parliament and palace is a sanatorium, every minister nursing their own carefully prescribed hallucination, convinced that history blinks only for them. Deluded American politicians have nukes, though

By April 5, things Trump has said have long stopped making sense. Perhaps this is what empire looks like at the end, the sovereign as oracle, babbling imagined victories. The absurdity isn’t just his contradictions; it’s the way the contradictions form their own theology, their own shimmering truth. He wasn’t getting facts wrong; he was inventing facts from scratch, waging war not just in Iran, but on the stability of the present tense.

Iran lived and died and lived again, NATO alternately harangued, betrayed and ignored, the Strait opened and closed like an eyelid. Each proclamation devoured the one before it. The journalists who transcribed it have become theologians without even realising it, recording the steady unravelling of an empire driven by one man’s psychotomimetic behaviours. Front row seats to the end of an empire and possibly humanity as we know it. What a time to be alive!

The absurdity here is not merely rhetorical. It is operational. If the President does not know whether the U.S. has won, needs help, wants NATO, uses the strait, or is talking or not talking to Iran, then no adversary fears the threats, no ally trusts the pleas, and no journalist understands the policy. Some will argue this is strategic chaos, 4D chess or the like, keeping adversaries off balance. But chaos without consistency is not strategy; it is just noise. A country cannot ally with, threaten, ignore, beg, and praise the God of an enemy it has declared “dead” within the same month without eroding every instrument of statecraft.

And perhaps, in some Trumpian galaxy-brained sense, he really did win the war, not against Iran, but against the tyranny of rationality itself.

Step one: pick a fight in some oil-rich corner of the map where global trade depends on everyone not throwing missiles and drones at each other. Knock out 20% of the world’s energy supply, then act surprised when petrol prices rocket, and people start cycling again, not out of environmental virtue, but because they can’t afford to drive to work. Congratulations, you’ve just concocted some fuel austerity and quite another, more deathly kind of austerity, where health and welfare budgets are slashed.

Step two: look around for support. You’ll find that your allies have suddenly developed a rare medical condition called “strategic avoidence” They don’t want to bomb anyone this year. They’re busy with domestic problems, you know, voters, hospitals, electricity bills. Naturally, you accuse them of moral weakness. “Where,” you demand, “is the courage of the free world?” It’s in bed, nursing an Iraq/Afghanistan hangover, and doesn’t want to come to your party. You toss a match into the oil drums of civilisation, cut a vein through which a fifth of the planet’s blood drains, then call it strategy. Winning bigly!!

Step three: apply pressure. Try to bully your allies into agreement. Leak rumours to the press that they’re unreliable, treacherous, French or even worse, English. Talk about “shared values” in the tone of a man shaking his empty wallet. Threaten sanctions, tariffs, and all manner of terrible things usually reserved for enemies. You’re trying to turn your former friends into cowed vassals, and accuse them of moral weakness for not leaping headfirst into your lunacy. Ya, that’ll work. You browbeat them anyway, threaten more sanctions, and wrap it all in the flag, promising that democracy will triumph just as soon as you can remember what the objective was, what year it is, and get off the fucking mad tangent about a ballroom. The result, as ever, is a world dumber and less safe than it was last week, run by White House Kleptocrats who think leadership means setting the curtains on fire and then holding a press conference about fire safety.

(As for the oil traders and other commodities weirdos, you screen‑eyed, drooling imbeciles, you might be the only fuckers on the planet managing to act even dumber and more deranged than Trump himself.)

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

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Insiders have made millions on Iran strikes, timing bets like Nostradamus with a Bloomberg terminal, prompting “insider trading” rules that reek of too-late piety, pricing geopolitics…

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We’re told this is success. Ireland, once poor, once emigrant, now a gleaming hub of global capital; the free market’s fairy story, with pints of stout. But peel back the PR jargon, the TED talks and LinkedIn posts about “talent” and “ecosystems”, and what you actually have is a small, peripheral state that has allowed itself to become a fiscal appendage of the United States. A kind of offshore pantry in which Washington stores its companies’ profits until it is ready to eat them.

The numbers are stark. Foreign multinationals, mostly American, paid about 88% of all Irish corporate tax in 2024, with just the top ten firms supplying 57% of receipts. Within that, three US giants alone accounted for roughly 46% of all corporate tax in 2024, around €13 billion of €28.1 billion. Corporate tax itself has swollen from roughly €4.6 billion in 2014 to about €28 billion a decade later. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council estimates that roughly three‑quarters of corporation tax is paid by large US multinationals. Ireland’s exposure is not just fiscal but structural. US‑owned multinationals directly employ around 11% of the Irish workforce, with many more jobs in legal, accounting and local services depending on their presence. Roughly a third of Irish goods exports go to the US, dominated by high‑value pharma and tech products tied to these same firms.

The government insists, in that dull, managerial tone it reserves for talking about looming catastrophe, that this inflow of corporate tax is “welcome but volatile”, “windfall not permanent”, like a surprise inheritance from a rich uncle with a history of drunk driving. And yet it continues to spend the money as if it were a never-ending supply of free money. Year after year, budgets are padded, promises are made, and long‑term spending is built on a tax base that depends on the continued indulgence of a handful of American CFOs and whatever mood capricious US president wakes up in. It’s like funding your mortgage with casino winnings and then solemnly explaining that, yes, obviously, you know it’s risky, but the auld blackjack has been going very well lately.

This isn’t a symbiotic relationship; it’s dependency. Ireland likes to imagine itself as the nimble seducer of global capital, luring multinationals with low taxes and English‑language vibes. In reality, it’s the client in a client–patron relationship, nervously watching the other party’s face for signs of boredom or anger. Every time Congress or the E.U. mutters about global minimum tax, every time some White House staffer says the word “offshoring” in a disapproving tone, the Irish Department of Finance starts to get panic attacks. Entire departments exist within the department essentially to read the tea leaves of whatever U.S. tax policy Trump has dreamt up and report back on whether we’re going to have to have a grown-up national conversation on fiscal responsibility.

The ideological cover story is that all this is “FDI‑led growth”. What an elegant phrase for “we put the tax code in fishnets and worked the street until something in a polo shirt and pair of chinos pulled over.” The Irish economy has been remodelled into a kind of industrial park for US capital, a safe space for profits fleeing democratic oversight back home. Intellectual property, this disembodied, spectral wealth, is teleported into Irish subsidiaries; cosmic sums of money swirl through multinational accounts in Dublin and Cork; and the State takes a tiny cut, like a dealer in a rigged casino. This is called “competitiveness”. We are meant to go home, look in the mirror and applaud ourselves.

And because the sums are so obscene, the country starts to believe its own lie. The GDP figures balloon into the realm of fantasy; commentators start comparing Ireland, a damp archipelago with a housing crisis so baroque it verges on performance art, to economic superpowers. Politicians boast about surpluses and “fiscal space” as though this were the product of some native genius, rather than the good fortune of having parked ourselves at a profitable kink in the plumbing of global tax arbitrage.

There is something a little humiliating in this. Not the humiliation of poverty, that at least can be dignified, but the humiliation of willing vassalage. The humiliation of reorganising your entire tax system, your industrial strategy, your very sense of national self-worth around the needs of a few foreign companies and the sensibilities of a foreign treasury. Irish public life has been colonised by the idea that “what’s good for US multinationals is good for Ireland”, in the same way imperial administrators once insisted that what was good for London was good for Dublin.

Look at the structure of the Exchequer returns, and you see a country that has effectively outsourced its fiscal autonomy. When three firms can, by a tweak in their internal booking of profits, erase billions from the State’s tax receipts, what you have is not a democratically controlled fiscal system but a revenue stream contingent on external corporate whim. When Washington can, by adjusting its own tax code, make or break that revenue stream, what you have is not independence but a suspended sentence.

And it’s not just the money. The whole domestic economy is bent around servicing this arrangement. A big chunk of the country’s most highly educated workers are employed in what are essentially branch offices of US corporations, local nodes in global structures over which Ireland has precisely zero strategic control. Around them grows an ecosystem of law firms, accountants, consultants, and boutique PR outfits whose core function is to keep the plates spinning: to ensure the flows of profit continue to pass through Irish jurisdiction, to interpret every international reform as an opportunity rather than the clear rebuke it is.

Meanwhile, in the indigenous economy, small firms, regional industries, and actual productive capacity rooted in place sit crouched in the shadow of this giant, distorted edifice. Why build complex, long‑term industrial policy when you can simply rely on Apple and friends to show up with their tax‑optimised billions? Reality becomes something that happens to other countries. Ireland lives inside an accounting trick.

The horror is that everyone knows. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and every respectable think‑tank in the land have been running around with their heads on fire, warning of “concentration risk”, begging governments to treat corporate tax receipts as windfall, to salt them away, to build buffers. The advice is duly acknowledged, filleted into a press release, and then quietly drowned in the foam of the next budget day amuse-bouche for special interest groups. No one wants to be the minister who tells voters that the party is funded by a foreign bar tab and it might be cut off at any moment.

Beneath the charts and the cautious language, the basic dynamic is brutishly simple. Ireland is a cog in America’s economic machinery. For as long as that machinery needs us, an English‑speaking, EU‑member, low‑tax gateway, we get showered with gold. But all that glitters is not gold. The moment the design changes, we will discover that our celebrated “model” was a precarious little platform attached to the side of a leviathan, and the bolts were always provisional.

What would an adult country do? It would separate these receipts, save most of them, and fund day‑to‑day spending from taxes tied to the real domestic economy. It would use the breathing‑space to build an indigenous productive base not eternally dependent on the grace and favour of Silicon Valley. It would accept slower headline growth in exchange for actual fiscal sovereignty. Instead, we have a politics that behaves as if this dependence is destiny. As if Ireland is naturally suited to be the world’s polite bookkeeper, a cheerful intermediary between American capital and European regulation. It is the mentality of a service corridor: we don’t own the restaurant, we carry the plates. We are not expected to have opinions, only to be “stable” and “predictable” and “business‑friendly”, a country whose primary emotional register is gratitude.

The irony is that the American companies themselves have no such loyalty. They are not friends; they are not partners in some romantic entanglement across the Atlantic. They are machines for maximising shareholder value, and they will disassemble Ireland and move it somewhere else the moment the numbers tell them to. At that point, we will discover how much of our supposed prosperity was actually just someone else’s tax avoidance scheme. You look at the pharma plants, and the tech offices, all that chrome and glass serenity, and you realise the machines aren’t really part of the building, they’re just bolted to the floor and can be moved anywhere in the world at the flick of a CFO’s wrist.

If Ireland wants to be more than a glorified annex to the US tax code, it has to start by admitting what it is now: over‑reliant, over‑exposed, and politically addicted to the easy money of foreign profits.

Would any country taking in the amount of cash that Ireland sucks in from the U.S.A do anything differently? Probably not. When a superpower backs a truck up to your front door and starts shovelling in cash, you don’t lecture it on values, you offer to carry the smaller bundles yourself. The truth is, most countries would happily dress up in green and juggle shamrocks on Pennsylvania Avenue for a fraction of what Ireland takes from American multinationals. Principles are lovely in theory, but Ireland is now Europe’s second-most expensive country, with consumer prices 38% above the EU average, childcare +58%, and some of the most expensive housing in the world. Government expenditure growth is the highest in the EU through 2030, with net spending rising 7.1% annually, double the rate of other European countries, fuelled by corporation tax windfalls. No other country would do it differently; they’d just be less preachy about the hypocrisy. And when the next crash comes, and it will come, Ireland will be hit harder than most, but the first people complaining about the Taoiseach’s visit to the White House to prostrate himself at the altar of American capitalism will also be the same people complaining they’ve lost their jobs because the Taoiseach didn’t do enough. There’s a word for that.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The St Patrick’s Day visit of the Irish Taoiseach to the White House grew from a small diplomatic gesture in the 1950s into a set-piece of the transatlantic political calendar by the 1990s.

In 1952, Irish ambassador John Hearne presented a simple box of shamrock to US President Harry Truman. In 1956 taoiseach John A. Costello became the first Irish head of government to mark St Patrick’s Day with a meeting at the White House, creating the basic template of a symbolic, Irish-themed photo opportunity at the heart of American power. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the shamrock ritual usually involved the Irish ambassador, with the taoiseach only occasionally appearing, and no guarantee of a serious political meeting with the president. Under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the tradition was upgraded, with Reagan personally receiving a shamrock and later inviting Garret FitzGerald and Charles Haughey to the White House for St Patrick’s events.

By the 1990s, particularly under Bill Clinton, the St Patrick’s Day encounter had hardened into an annual summit between the president and taoiseach, framed around a formal shamrock presentation, Oval Office talks and a high-profile Irish presence on Capitol Hill. Clinton’s focus on Northern Ireland elevated the day from soft-diplomatic ritual to a regular opportunity to signal US engagement with the peace process.​

Since then, successive Taoisigh – John Bruton, Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen, Enda Kenny, Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin – have made the mid-March homage to Washington almost every year, with only disruptions such as the Covid pandemic forcing virtual meetings. In the 21st century, the “bowl of shamrock” ceremony has doubled as an annual stock-take of US–Irish relations and a platform for both governments to talk about issues from trade to Northern Ireland and wider foreign policy. Ireland supplies the quaintness, America supplies the power, and everyone pretends this is an exchange of equals rather than a vassal presenting herbs at court.

Under Clinton or Obama, St Patrick’s Day in Washington was a stage-managed affirmation of the “special relationship”; under Trump, it is a tightrope between angering a capricious superpower and looking like a supplicant who will endure anything for access and investment. The whole ceremony exposes the basic contradiction: Ireland insists it is a principled, rights‑talking state, yet its most visible diplomatic moment each year is now an awkward, televised deference to a president large parts of Irish society openly despise.

Every year, St. Patrick has become best marketed saint in Christianity, in no small part, thanks to Ireland’s diplomats, and every year, the Department of Foreign Affairs releases a video to celebrate Ireland and its Irish diaspora.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh to my subscribers in all 50 of the great United States and 93 other countries.

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Start with the easy targets: petrol and diesel. These are the pantomime villains, the thing you see on the news when someone blocks a motorway in an orange vest. It is real, it is dirty, but it is also a convenient distraction. Because once the fuel has been refined, a large chunk of the barrel doesn’t go into engines at all. It goes into cracking plants that turn crude into charming, tweet‑sized molecules—ethylene, propylene, benzene, ammonia, Lego pieces for the petrochemical industry. Out of those little bricks comes… well, everything. Cut the nozzle off the pump, and the barrel simply walks in through the back door as a shampoo bottle, a pair of Doc Martens boots, or a surgical glove.

Look around the room you’re in now. The phone or laptop you’re reading this on? Oil, extruded into keys, casings and circuit‑board coatings. The credit card in your wallet? Oil, thinly disguised as responsibility. The bottle of water on your desk? Oil around the water, oil in the cap, and oil in the shrink wrap on the multi-pack. The carpet under your feet, the polyester on your back, the acrylic paint on the wall—solidified, dyed and woven petroleum. We turned dinosaurs and ancient algae into yoga pants and then call them “athleisure”.

Even virtue comes shrink‑wrapped in crude. The solar panel on your neighbour’s roof, the wind turbine in the glossy environmental brochure, even the electric car and those nasty, cheap interior Teslas posed against a fjord: all petrochemical success stories. The blades, the resins, the sealants, the insulation, the sleek dashboard and faux‑leather seats are fossil carbon wearing a green badge. We have built an entire religion of “transition” on the premise that we can keep the toys and just swap out the fuel, as if the problem were an exhaust pipe rather than the entire industrial metabolism behind it.

Then there is the intimate stuff, the things we rub into our bodies, your own skin moisturised with the liquefied ghosts of Precambrian plankton and fed to our children. The bathroom shelf is a small petro‑state: shampoos, conditioners, moisturisers, deodorants, perfumes, toothpastes, sunscreens, each a cheerful cocktail of petroleum‑derived surfactants, solvents, preservatives and fragrances, decanted into plastic bottles destined for landfills and oceans. The food in your fridge is there because natural‑gas‑derived fertiliser kept the crop alive; it is wrapped in petroplastic film, nestled in petroplastic trays, labelled with petrochemical inks and glued together with petrochemical adhesives. Even the fake berry flavour in the yoghurt may share a family tree with industrial dyes and fuel additives.

And when the system makes us sick, we throw more oil at the problem. Hospitals run on fossil carbon in the literal sense and in the soft, polymerised sense: single‑use syringes, IV bags, tubing, masks, catheters, heart‑monitor casings, MRI housings, filters, gloves, all designed to be used once and binned. A good chunk of the medicine inside those syringes and bags is synthesised from petrochemical precursors too. We have achieved the miracle of turning oil into both the disease vector and the band‑aid.

The punchline is that, after constructing this petrochemical spiderweb over every aspect of existence, the same corporations and governments now present “net zero by 2050” as an act of heroic self‑denial. The adverts show children in fields of wind turbines while a soft voice assures you that “together, we’re changing our energy”. Notice the sleight of hand: energy, not materials. They will happily talk about swapping out petrol for electrons, but remain oddly quiet about the plastics, fibres, solvents, fertilisers, additives and pharmaceuticals that are the real profit centres. You are encouraged to feel personally guilty about driving to the shops; nobody invites you to feel political rage that there is no non‑petrochemical option for buying a toothbrush or an antibiotic.

This is the real scandal: we were never offered a choice. Nobody asked you whether you wanted your clothes to be woven from polymers that shed microplastic into your lungs and your blood, or whether you’d prefer a food system chained to gas‑derived fertiliser that props up fragile monocultures. The decision was made decades ago in boardrooms and ministries, on the simple basis that oil was cheap, abundant and profitable, and that any environmental bill would fall due long after the decision‑makers had retired to their petrochemical‑financed villas.

So when someone says we need to “wean ourselves off” fossil fuels, imagine trying to wean a fish off water. The point is not to scold individuals for failing to be pure in a world that has been deliberately saturated. The point is to see the saturation, how far it goes, how total it is, and to understand that what stands between us and a different kind of life is not personal weakness but a built environment, an economic order, a lattice of molecules arranged into profit. The first step towards any escape is to admit where we are: standing in a bright, tidy room, surrounded by the liquefied, polymerised remains of the dead world beneath our feet, and calling it home.

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Dubai sells itself as a kind of end‑of‑history resort. It’s less a city than a subscription service for reality, premium tier: everything refrigerated, polished and delivered to your door in under fifteen minutes by slaves. The influencer lifestyle is full of looping content in which beautiful people with strange smiles, large lips, and soulless miens disseminate official government instructions on how to exist there. Of course, you will not be told that some of them are being paid for their propaganda or are secretly living in fear of saying the wrong thing. Getting arrested, having fingernails pulled out and being deported. That kinda trivial thing.

The Dubai influencer isn’t just selling you a lifestyle; they’ve signed a digital non‑disclosure agreement with a totalitarian regime. Their job is to point the camera everywhere except at reality. The deal is simple: you can pan lovingly over towers, sea front brunches and Lamborghinis with gauche enthusiasm as long as you never so much as tilt the lens toward where the slave workers exist, who built the skyline, trafficked women who serve the nation’s religious and political hypocrites. Whatever you don’t highlight authoritarian legislation; that quietly keeps everyone posting the same unexceptional content.

These influencer parasites like to talk about “authenticity,” and then dutifully hand in their critical faculties at passport control. They pose in front of a carefully curated absence: no prisons, no deportations, no crushed unions or criminalised dissent, just one long, looping advert for a country that only exists for their content. What you’re seeing isn’t Dubai; it’s the regime’s front‑facing camera, filtered, softened, and posted with a tacit implication.

UAE Politics has been resolved into a series of brand partnerships. There is stability, there is safety, and there is financial growth. If you find yourself wondering, “at what cost?” that is a personal failing, a mindset problem, something you should work through with a life coach in a coworking space overlooking the marina. The entire country is curated to stop you from asking that question. People talk about “the social contract,” but this is something stranger, a social NDA. The state will give you everything you thought you wanted: tax‑free income, air‑conditioned ambition, brunch presented like ritual sacrifice to the gods of content. In return, you agree not to notice that you are living inside a mirage. You may speak freely about anything, as long as the regime approves.

Because there is a whole parallel reality here that must never quite come into focus. A place where criticism is not answered but quietly suppressed. Where politics is not contested but preemptively strangled with kid gloves, probably made by kids. Where the line between “crime” and “embarrassment to the authorities” is so thin it may as well be a hairline crack in your phone screen. If you insist too loudly that you have rights, rights as in claims enforceable against power, not as in “the right to network on LinkedIn, you will discover that what you actually have is a residency visa and a problem.

The system is clever. It does not need to constantly crack down, because it has turned everyone into their own censor. Laws against “offending the state,” “harming its reputation,” “spreading rumours” hang over public life like unspoken etiquette. You don’t know exactly where the boundary lies, only that it exists. So you learn to talk around things. You develop a kind of conversational feng shui, arranging your sentences so that no sharp corner points directly at power. You can complain about the heat, the traffic, your workload, and your carefully curated existence, never about the fact that in a country where slavery still exists and has surgically removed human rights from public life and replaced them with “vision documents.”

Into this void steps the influencer, the regime’s favourite citizen. They are not just paid propagandists; they are something more useful, a self‑sustaining hallucination. Their job is to prove, simply by existing, that none of this matters. Watch them glide past towers that look like USB sticks stabbed into the desert. Watch them lean over a balcony and tell you that you, too, could escape “the negativity” back home, by which they mean functioning trade unions and the ability to call your prime minister an imbecile without worrying about getting tortured.

These people talk about “freedom” in a place where freedom has been boiled down to dietary choices and passport stamps. They have never voted here, and never will. They will never join a demonstration, because demonstrations do not happen. They do not belong to trade unions; they belong to content houses. Their sense of liberty is purely gravitational: the dizziness of not paying tax, the weightlessness of leaving behind a social order in which ordinary people sometimes, annoyingly, interfere with the plans of the rich and useless.

The real trick is how easily this feels like an upgrade. Democracy is messy, slow, and frequently stupid. Courts are fallible. Journalists are irritating. Protesters block the road when you’re late. In the UAE, none of that obstructive citizenry exists. Nothing gets in the way of “vision” and “progress”, and “content, endless streams of the same bland, botoxed insignificance. The trains, if there were any, would run on time. You no longer have to tolerate the embarrassing spectacle of fellow humans trying to decide how they are governed. Someone has done that for you, permanently, and given you a balcony in compensation.

The absence of income tax is sold as a kind of emancipation. No more state with its hand in your pocket. But in the liberal democracies these people flee, tax is the grubby mechanism by which courts, teachers, doctors and ombudsmen are funded, imperfect tools that occasionally force the state to obey its own rules. What you are really trading is boring, procedural protections for the right to keep every cent of your earnings until the moment the system decides it doesn’t like you. In that moment, you will find that the government you never paid for owes you nothing.

Meanwhile, the entire arrangement sits on a foundation that must not be spoken about in polite, brunch‑adjacent company: the vast underclass of migrant workers who built the towers, clean the lurid shops and live in conditions carefully quarantined away from the influencer’s field of view. The miracle of the desert city is powered by people who are not invited to share in the mirage of rights at all. Their existence contradicts the fiction that this is a meritocratic playground for the global content zombie class, so they are edited out, cropped at the ankle, blurred into the background, rendered as “service staff” if they are acknowledged at all.

This is what passes for human rights in the UAE and most countries in the Middle East: the right to turn your head away. The right to live in a perpetual panoramic shot, all skyline and no street. Rights have become a matter of optics; if the surface looks smooth enough, we are invited to conclude that justice must be happening somewhere in the foundations. There are, of course, formal guarantees and official statements and English‑language reports about “commitment” and “reform.” These are not there for you to rely on; they are there for you to quote back at yourself when you start to get nervous because you said the wrong thing in public.

Human rights in the United Arab Emirates are not violated by accident; they are structured out of the system on purpose. The country’s legal architecture is designed less like a set of rules for citizens and more like a user manual for a very sensitive machine: do not touch, do not question, do not open the casing. If you want to understand the UAE, don’t start with the skyline; start with the laws that tell you how small you’re supposed to feel beneath it.

At the core of this order sits the cybercrime and “rumours” framework, a law written in the nervous, paranoid prose of a state that never wants to be publicly embarrassed again. Here, you do not simply get punished for inciting violence or doxxing your neighbour; you can be prosecuted for “harming the reputation” or “prestige” of the state, for spreading “false news,” for sharing documents that might “damage public confidence.” These are not legal categories so much as vibes, and that is exactly the point. In a liberal democracy, law tells you what you cannot do; in the UAE, it tells you that anything which makes the authorities uncomfortable can be retroactively defined as a crime.

Layered on top of this is an expansive system of counterterrorism and extremism statutes that treat dissent as a branch of national security. Terrorism, in this vocabulary, is not just bombings or kidnappings; it can mean “antagonising the state,” “stirring panic,” or joining an organisation that exists mainly on paper and in the heads of worried bureaucrats. Activists, human‑rights defenders, and political reformists find themselves accused of terrorism not because they planted bombs, but because they planted ideas. Once you are in that category, the penalties, extreme sentences, indefinite detention, and even the death penalty, stop being theoretical and start being a tool of domestic discipline.

The result is a kind of legal panopticon. Political parties, as you’d recognise them in Europe or North America, do not exist. Human rights are squeezed out of reality. Civil society organisations that try to function independently of the state are either strangled at birth or wrapped in regulatory red tape until they suffocate. Freedom of association becomes a permission rather than a right: you may gather to praise, to network, to do business, but not to challenge. The courtroom, instead of being a place where individuals and the state meet on nominally equal footing, becomes an extension of executive power, cloaking decisions taken elsewhere in the language of “security” and “stability.”

Recent media regulations complete the loop. Traditional press, online outlets, and even influencers are funnelled into a regime of licensing, content rules and back‑end pressure that makes it dangerous to publish anything that reads like real journalism. “Fake news,” “sectarianism,” “harmful content” – these words are not carefully defined because their power lies in being elastic. A government genuinely interested in free expression defines its restrictions tightly; a government interested in control defines them so broadly that any unwelcome fact can be made to fit.

Most chilling of all is how far the state’s reach extends beyond individual dissidents. If you speak up, it is not only you who may face arrest, trial on sweeping charges, and long‑term imprisonment; your relatives, business partners and even companies abroad can be tarred with the same “terrorist” brush. Travel bans, asset freezes, reputational smears – collective punishment by legal designation. It is a message written in the lives of other people: your politics are no longer yours alone; they are a liability for everyone who knows you.

What emerges from all this is not simply a place with “tough laws” or “strict standards.” It is a system in which the idea of enforceable rights, claims you can make against power, backed by independent institutions, is replaced by a structure of conditional privileges. You may speak until the state decides you have said the wrong thing. You may organise, until the state decides your organisation looks a bit too much like politics. You may stay, prosper, build a life, until you collide with interests that matter more than your existence or if you happen to be gay, which carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years. It’s nice and safe so long as you’re heterosexual.

This is why talk of “freedom” in the UAE, especially from the mealy mouths of wealthy expats and influencers, feels so weightless. Freedom, as they use the word, means not paying income tax, not dealing with striking workers, not having to think about elections or protests or awkward newspaper headlines. It means the ease of a world where politics has been tidied away by someone else. The legal reality beneath that ease is very different. It is a dense, deliberate web of provisions that keeps power concentrated where it has always been, and ensures that anyone who tries to pull at the threads discovers how little they were ever allowed to touch.

The strangest thing is how many people, fully aware of all this, still move there and call it safety and freedom. They have confused the absence of obligations with the presence of rights. They boast about being “sovereign individuals” while living in a place where sovereignty is precisely the one thing they do not possess. They insist they have “never felt safer,” as missiles rain down, which is true in the way a well‑behaved child in a very strict household feels safe: nothing bad will happen to you as long as it doesn’t occur to you to want anything you aren’t meant to have.

The desert is honest. It tells you what it is: a vast, indifferent expanse in which you are small and fragile and temporary. The city built on top of it is less truthful. It promises that you can step outside politics, outside history, outside the tedious business of being a citizen, and live instead as a frictionless consumer in a climate‑controlled now. It is a beautiful lie, and the price of believing it is simple. You give up the dull, annoying, argumentative freedoms that make you a political subject with human rights, and in exchange, you become the content you post.

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Irish nationalism has always been fond of maps. Our island, the line, the six counties, the twenty-six counties, like a missing tooth in the smile of our nation, this is the cartography of our emotions. We ache for a 32-county republic complete, a green blot with no British fingerprints smudged on the corner. We sing about the soil and weep over vainglorious loss and border posts and forgoteen heros, as if modern power still lives in the shape and blood of our fields. Meanwhile, the actual frontier of the Irish state, our skies, our seas, the seabed bristling with cables that carry the world’s nervous system—lies mostly undefended, patrolled by other nations’ aircraft and other nations’ ships, for other people’s reasons.

We are, in our own estimation, a proud and sovereign folk, so long as the sky stays empty and the sea keeps quiet. The moment something flickers above us or stirs beyond the coast, the mask slips; the sovereign independent grandeur dissolves into outsourced anxieties, and a bureaucratic embarrassment that always follows a crisis we’re not equipped to name, let alone deal with.

The national story goes like this: a small nation, fiercely fought an independence struggle from an empire, a stubborn nation, neutral and independent, standing aloof from imperial entanglements, too morally refined to get its hands dirty with the vulgarities of realpolitik and geopolitical realities. But neutrality is not a philosophy here; it’s a brand strategy, a folksy Irish dancing costume for a country that quietly subcontracted the normally boring, expensive parts of sovereignty to its neighbours. We howl about British soldiers in Northern Ireland, while politely depending on British pilots to chase away anything suspicious that wanders into “our” airspace. We grip the rosary beads of independence with one hand while the other hands the sovereign keys of independence to London and Paris and asks them to watch the house while we’re at the pub discussing how Russian fascism has no interest in Ireland, sure, we’re harmless.

This is not some noble refusal of militarism. It’s a kind of spiritual freeloading.

The Irish state and elements of our political class have discovered a remarkable geopolitical innovation: the concept of “sovereignty, terms and conditions apply.” On paper, the airspace is ours. In practice, if a rogue aircraft or drones appear heading toward Dublin, or down the west coast of Ireland, it will most likely be a British jet that screams up to meet it, its pilot politely pretending this is all a normal extension of neighbourly goodwill and not the quiet admission that our much-vaunted republic can’t, in a tight spot, have the ability to get off the ground. This proud, historic nation, cradle of saints and scholars, is basically a Ryanair departures board with delusions of grandeur.

Look at the numbers, if you can bear the boredom. A defence budget that could barely keep a medium-sized American suburb in fireworks. A navy that would struggle to escort a cruise ship, let alone protect an oceanic frontier. A chronic inability to monitor, never mind defend, the strands of glass and data that run along our seabed and keep most of the world talking to itself. We sit on a tangle of undersea cables that connect North America to Europe, a nervous knot in the global system of communications, and our attitude to this is essentially: sure, the Brits will keep an eyeout for us, won’t they? Maybe the French, if they’re not too busy having a navy. In recent days, even the Germans have been patrolling our waters. The last time the Kriegsmarine, as they were known then, got this close to Dublin, they were looking to sink some British ships. Now they have a more noble task, defending a country that can’t defend itself.

For a movement so obsessed with the betrayal of 1916, Irish nationalism has developed a strange tolerance for the ongoing betrayal of reality.

Because reality is this: in the twenty-first century, the real partition isn’t on land. It’s between what we pretend to own and what we can actually protect. We claim a vast exclusive economic zone, but the words “exclusive” and “zone” here have the forced confidence of a lad insisting the bouncer definitely knows him. The cables, the energy interconnectors, the ports, the shipping lanes - these are the beating apparatus of state that keep the country’s economy alive, and they are kept safe and patrolled by powers we like to define ourselves against in song.

They patrol our air and seas for their benefit, also, not just out of kindness. When the Royal Navy pokes around our waters, when NATO-types swivel their binoculars across our horizon, they do not do it out of tender regard for the harp and the shamrock and take pity on us. They do it because what lies off our coast matters to them: their data, their trade, their strategic depth, our strategic weakness. If it aligns with our interests, that’s a happy coincidence. We’ve mistaken the overlap of interests for a guarantee. We’ve confused “they don’t want this blown up either” with “they’ll always save us because we’re neutral.”

Elements of our political class, particularly the uber-nationalists, sell this dependence as moral refinement. We don’t have jets, you see, because we’re peaceful. We don’t have a serious naval capacity because we are not like those vulgar, bellicose countries that think in terms of realpolitik. We spend pennies on defence and call it a principled repudiation of militarism, like a man refusing to pay his restaurant bill because he’s opposed to capitalism. The actual principle is simple: Let someone else pay for our security.

Meanwhile, the nationalist imagination continues to stay landlocked. It is still 1972 in some politicians’ heads: soldiers, street barricades, flags over council buildings, arguments about lines on atlas maps or so-called peace walls. But the world is no longer arranged around infantry and checkpoints. Coercion now travels along cables, through ports, via disrupted satellites and severed infrastructure. You can cripple a state without ever sending a single soldier across a line. You just cut its nervous system a few kilometres offshore, in that blank blue bit of the map that so-called Irish Nationalism has never bothered to read about or appreciate.

And that’s where the hypocrisy sharpens into something uglier. If nationalism is the claim that a people should rule itself, then modern Irish nationalism has chosen a highly selective definition of “self” and a very relaxed definition of “rule.” We insist on the right to control territory we do not control, while showing no real interest in controlling the domains we already have. We rage at the idea of British authority in Belfast but shrug at British authority at 30,000 feet above County Laois or a British warship chasing Russian submarines away from Cork harbour. We romanticise Wolfe Tone and denounce Castle rule, and then outsource the last-resort monopoly of force over our own skies to the heirs of the Castle because radar is expensive and fighter jets are vulgar.

This is not anti-imperialism. It’s an aesthetic preference. All sound, noise and bombast, no substance.

We congratulate ourselves for not joining military alliances while quietly nesting inside the security envelope created by those alliances. We bask in the warm moral glow of neutrality while acting, in practice, like a tax exile from the responsibilities of sovereignty. The line is always the same: “Why would anyone attack us?” As if being useful to bigger powers - by geography, by infrastructure, by economic function - has never historically drawn trouble. As our island’s value, as a corridor and a critical node, does not increase precisely as we host more cables, more data centres, and more connections. As if the Russian submarine, snuffling along our seabeds like some blind, steel animal, will gently unclamp its jaws from the cable, flick on the cabin light, and consult Ireland’s Wikipedia page - and say it seems these nodes of global capital and data are draped in the soft vestments of neutrality, best leave them untouched.

The maddeningly saturnine thing is that the solution is not even particularly radical. Nobody is asking for an Irish aircraft carrier battle group to steam heroically through the North Atlantic. An honest, adult nationalism would start with something much more competently boring: a serious radar picture, a small but credible air component, an overworked and underappreciated navy that can function properly, a legal and institutional framework that treats seabed cables and maritime infrastructure as vital national instruments of state, not background scenery. It would mean accepting that if you want sovereignty, you have to pay for the hardware that makes sovereignty more than a wink or a nod or some rhetorical flourish.

But that requires giving up the narcotic comfort of the current story. Because once you admit that the republic relies on the UK and France and a general European security consensus to keep its arteries intact, you have to stop talking like a heroic little island standing alone in a cruel world. You have to admit that our posture is just speaking out of both sides of our mouth. You have to replace the romance of being permanently put-upon with the tenebrous responsibility of self-defence.

And that, fundamentally, is why the hypocrisy persists. It lets everyone have what they want. The so-called self-proclaimed nationalists get their rhetoric, their songs, and their refusal to grow up. The state gets its budget savings. The neighbours get their strategic interests taken care of, but with impudent Irish moral smugness. It’s an Irish solution to an Irish problem: everyone pretends, and nobody says the quiet part out loud, that our republic is not defended by the republic, but by other people who are happy for us to be a republic.

If you stood on the Cliffs of Moher and looked out over the Atlantic, and if you could see power the way you see weather, you’d see it: planes that aren’t ours, ships that aren’t ours, guarding infrastructure that supposedly is. An invisible architecture of other people’s guarantees, arching over a country that insists it is nobody’s client. Irish nationalism, for all its baroque thunder and self-mythologising, has engineered a peculiar monstrosity: a supposedly independent state that behaves like a sulky adolescent, slamming the bedroom door and howling “you’re not the boss of me” from a mortgage it never pays, in a house quietly underwritten by other people’s power.

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Sinn Féin and Ireland’s independent MEPs are aligned with the imaginatively named ‘The Left’ in the European Parliament, you guessed it, a left-leaning, socialist group whose voting record aligns with Russian interests a lot in parliament. The Left is the smallest political group in the EU parliament, similar to People Before Profit in the Dáil but just as loud and obnoxious. It’s not the only thing PBP have in common with ‘The Left’. In the European Parliament, ‘The Left’ is just as irrelevant as People Before Profit in the Dáil.

Groupings in the EU Parliament are important because they help facilitate cooperation and coordination among Members of the European Parliament (M…

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Enter Cathy Bennett, Sinn Féin TD for the Cavan–Monaghan constituency, and her headlong collision with how the European Union works.

It starts, as these things often do, with an innocent question that reveals a chasm. At an Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, Bennett wants to know about the “president of Europe.” Not as an off‑hand phrase, but as a concrete office, a throne that must be filled, a vacancy to which, presumably, the Irish state must send forth a champion. How much, she asks, is the Government spending to “find a candidate” for this post? One imagines a kind of pan‑continental X‑Factor: Leo Varadkar in a sequinned blazer, Ursula von der Leyen juggling dwarfs, a judging panel of scowling technocrats deducting points from Gerry Adams for insufficient fiscal discipline and the like.

The problem is that this person does not exist. There is no president of Europe. There are presidents everywhere, of course – Commission, Council, Parliament – proliferating like mould in the Brussels humidity, but no single crowned head of the continent. The EU, in its infinite genius, has constructed a system that is both impenetrably complex and utterly devoid of the monarchical glamour of the U.S. or French presidencies. The top jobs are traded in back rooms between governments and party families; no one is out there auditioning for the role of Emperor of Schengen.

So when Bennett insists on knowing who Ireland is “backing” for the presidency of this imaginary Europe, the scene takes on a strange, almost theological air. Officials shuffle their papers, trying to reconcile reality with the question. How do you tell a sitting TD that the office that she thought she was interrogating the unfortunate Minister about doesn't exist? Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Neale Richmond, let the hapless TD down very gently, in the same manner a vet would deliver bad news to the owner of a terminally ill puppy.

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Sinead wasn’t some temptress sent by Satan to lead a shepherd astray. She was practical, efficient, and, by most accounts, the only reason Father Bart hadn’t long since burned the rectory to the ground by accident. What grew between them wasn’t born of sin or seduction, but of routine, shared chores, quiet laughter, the drop of a han…

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Peter Mandelson, the political Lazarus of UK politics, who has twice resigned and was twice reborn, a man who made Machiavelli look like an amateur, appears to have missed this memo this time. For years, he floated through the Westminster geopolitical stratosphere with the unflappable serenity of a man whose hair never moves, dismissing questions about his pal Jeffrey Epstein as a “vulgar media fixation”. A passing acquaintance, he insisted. A distant figure. A mere footnote in a very long and detailed Epstein address book.

Well, the US Department of Justice dumped several million pages of Epstein’s “footnotes” into the public domain. And these footnotes have footnotes. And those foot…

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