RTÉ and the political lobby

Leinster House. Image © Faduda

“Labour want US style political advertising” It wasn’t the biggest ever story, but the Sunday Times liked it enough to pay me for it. It even got a bit of social media traction at the time. And it was based on three lines at the end of an internal RTÉ memo. In May 2010, a… Continue reading RTÉ and the political lobby

Ten Years On

Sometimes, it’s worth remembering how far we’ve come. ‘Looking back over the past decade, the landscape of policing in Northern Ireland has been transformed,’ foreign affairs minister Micheál Martin said today. ‘The PSNI is a modern police service, one which is representative of the community that it serves.’ ‘The blueprint for that transformation was the… Continue reading Ten Years On

Junk Watch

On the final day of my holiday in Donegal, I passed by a health food store. In the window was a handwritten notice offering “herbal swine flu remedies”. Then today, the Mayo News used their twitter account to promote the same idea. ‘Beat swine fly naturally with herbal remedies.’ Oh dear! Pseudoscience has been a… Continue reading Junk Watch

Just Say No

‘All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law’, our constitution grandly proclaims. Those words are clear cut. Among other things, I take them to mean that everyone should be pay their taxes, with no distinction in how citizens are treated. Which leads me to the conclusion, judges should pay their taxes.… Continue reading Just Say No

Introspection

Self-Googling should come with a government health warning. For various reasons, mainly to do with updating my CV and collecting potential reviews and recommendations (okay, vanity too) I do it now and then, just to see if I missed anything. Mostly, it involves zipping quickly past half a dozen pages of old news reports with… Continue reading Introspection