A line from Cicero in the 2023 film 'The Holdovers' piqued my interest over Christmas and I was reminded of the need to continuously reassert certain values in a chaotic world, taking inspiration from the great John Hume's 'single transferable speech'
A chance viewing of a festive neon art fixture in Rome burned the words, "we rise by lifting others" into my mind and I've thought about what it means ever since in a world that has strayed deeper into the corrosive darkness of cruelty and fear.
Shouldn't cavalier abuse of 'AI' tools inspire some sort of revulsion and punishment? A clash of values is playing out, where genuine intelligence, human experience, artisanship and hard work is set against hollow facsimile and outright charlatanry. What do we want to win?
According to Colin Barnes, zealous overfishing of sprat - to be sold as feed for commercial farming ventures on sea and land - has led to a steep decline in the numbers of other fish, whales, dolphins and seabirds off the south-west coast of Ireland. No sprat means no whales.
Reflecting on the folly of unduly smug armchair generals in a weirdly hawkish era of history, while hungry polar bears leave melting ice to invade abandoned Arctic villages in search of morsels.
Finally, a profile of a man who once said he'd "rather choke on [his] own blood in NI than live on streets paved with gold in a United Ireland". Unfortunately, it does little to interrogate his corrosive influence or why he enjoys such access to power.
Eamonn McCann and John Hume "wrecked this country", while imagined green conspiracies are afoot.
How the northern accent is scary to the people in the south of Ireland and why you should waste no time and start watching The Bear
Brief reflections on Ireland's opening game at the 2023 Women's World Cup and the casual partitionism of southern society
In a 1989 essay in the London Review of Books, John Hume wrote that, “the fundamental change that has taken place as a result of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is a change that is deeply and fully understood by every Unionist. What it means is that their exclusive hold on power has gone and is not coming back."
Nothing is written 