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ANNUAL 2025: CLERICAL ERRORS – MAKE PAPACY GREAT AGAIN

Date: November 12, 2025 -

The most important ecclesiastical event of 2025 was the death on April 18 of Pope Francis, the most consequential pontiff since Pope John Paul II (but inspired by Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council 1962-65). For several months the ailing Argentine’s fight for life in Rome’s Gemelli hospital attracted world media. Just when he appeared… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: ACADEMIA – McENTEE’S PREROGATIVE

Date: November 12, 2025 -

Norma Foley gave two hospital passes to Helen McEntee when she decamped from education to children. Both are related to the Leaving Certificate, that most politically sensitive topic. Norma avoided being tackled over inflated grades simply by letting them rip last year. This meant that the Saoirses and Ronans of the world could still get… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: WIGS ON THE GREEN – JUSTICE: IN EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Date: November 12, 2025 -

THROUGHOUT THE winter season generally, and Yuletide in particular, there is much in the way of mulling going around. The best kind, of course, is the wine but there are other sorts of mulling to be done as well. The public service media giant, the BBC, Old Auntie herself, probably won’t enjoy mulling over the… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: FOREIGN FROLICS – BOWING TO THE DON

Date: November 12, 2025 -

Throughout 2025 Irish foreign affairs policy negotiated shark-infested waters. Large foreign predators continually threatened peace on Earth. World leaders displayed nervous smiles, apart from Benjamin Netanyahu who, with Donald Trump’s assistance, killed as many Palestinians as possible, bombed Israel’s neighbours, and started – and then tried to maintain – a new forever war with Iran…. Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: BEHIND THE SCENES – COCK-UPS, CANCELLATIONS AND KNEECAP

Date: November 12, 2025 -

ANOTHER YEAR of flops and farce in the arts and entertainment world hurtles to a close with the a huge question mark over the State’s main funding body, the €140m per annum Arts Council. It found itself very much centre stage as the politicians (finally) took notice of a near €7m cock-up. With TDs and… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: HIGH SOCIETY – HIGH TIMES FOR HIGH-NET-WORTH INDIVIDUALS

Date: November 12, 2025 -

THIS YEAR it turned out that there was more moolah than ever sloshing about the country, with the number of millionaires on the rise and the cost of high living on the up. The ‘old’ money, however, was still very much front and centre – most notably courtesy of John Magnier’s disastrous High Court action… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: MONEYBAGS – IRISH SHARES THAT WILL MAKE THEIR MOVE IN 2026

Date: November 12, 2025 -

WITH INCREASING numbers of major Irish-quoted companies migrating their quotation away from the home market in the last couple of years – in particular major stocks such as CRH, Flutter and Smurfit Kappa, which migrated to New York in the wake of stocks like Greencore, Grafton and DCC that migrated to London – the Irish… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: MONEYBAGS – WINNERS AND LOSERS IN 2025

Date: November 12, 2025 -

It is quite the surprise to find that this year’s top-performing stock is Eamonn Crowley’s PTSB, which Moneybags had written off but where the shares are up 124%. Although the CEO managed to push profits up to €166m in 2023 and €180m last year, the bank was back down to €51m for the first half… Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: MONEYBAGS PROFILE – TOM HICKEY

Date: November 12, 2025 -

DOWN IN Mozambique, an Irish company has been responsible for a huge minerals mine producing ilmenite (a heavy metal ore of titanium and iron used to produce the pigment found in white paint, plastics and paper). The firm operates on a vast scale and apparently is responsible for around 5% of the African country’s GDP…. Read more »

ANNUAL 2025: BRIEF CASES – FOOD (AND DRINK) FOR THOUGHT IN 2025

Date: November 12, 2025 -

DJ CAREY may have grabbed all the headlines for his conviction and jailing but at just as fascinating was the sentencing of Celtic Tiger poster boy Philip ‘Philo’ Marley over a plethora of fraud charges. Marley stood accused of theft, money laundering and property registration offences, involving sums between €22,000 and €246,000 and, for several… Read more »

HOW LONG CAN MARTIN HOLD ON?

Date: October 30, 2025 -

MICHEÁL MARTIN’S leadership currently survives because of the sullen toleration of most of his TDs and the reluctance of leader-in-waiting Jim O’Callaghan to unsheathe his sword. We have listed the numbers of TDs regarded as now willing to vote against Martin’s continuing leadership (see p10) but not all of these are willing to do so… Read more »

PROFILE: BEN COLLINS

Date: October 30, 2025 -

IRELAND’S FUTURE, the main proponents of the growing call for a border poll on Irish unity, is sometimes accused of not engaging with unionists. Such critics will be a little non-plussed at the publication of not one but two books in three years by Ben Collins – Irish Unity: Time to Prepare and his recently… Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: ASHLEY MCDONNELL

Date: October 30, 2025 -

You have to hand it to Ashley McDonnell – she certainly knows how to put a positive spin on things. Having spent the past five years bigging up her role in PUIG, a group that owns and operates luxury fashion and beauty brands, the Galway woman has now parted ways with the Spanish company. With… Read more »

KEVIN KIELY V PAUL DURCAN

Date: October 30, 2025 -

THE IRISH ‘poetic community’ is a small one so it is not too surprising that there has been plenty of chatter about the bad taste exposed in an article penned by controversial biographer, critic and poet Kevin Kiely in The Village magazine last month. Titled “Reading in the Durc”, the piece dismisses the work of… Read more »

PRINCE ANDREW’S PR

Date: October 30, 2025 -

VIRGINIA ROBERTS GIUFFRE, who was abused by Prince Andrew, died by suicide last April after completing her book, Nobody’s Girl, which has just gone on sale. By amazing coincidence, a wave of about 20 books on Giuffre have suddenly flooded Amazon, all of which are “independently published”. One is a mere 82 pages long. Anyone… Read more »

MATT COOPER FIBS ABOUT BEN DUNNE

Date: October 30, 2025 -

THERE ARE not many editors and authors who would admit to telling a “deliberate mistruth” about a national corruption story on the front page of their newspaper and one has to congratulate Matt Cooper, author of Dynasty, his recently published book on the Dunnes Stores family, for coming clean on his deception back in 1996…. Read more »

DERMOT DESMOND V BRENDAN RODGERS

Date: October 30, 2025 -

MOST OBSERVERS will have been surprised by Dermot Desmond’s uncharacteristic tactic of lunging two-footed at outgoing Glasgow Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers. This has not been Der Kaiser’s style and, despite being easily the biggest shareholder in the club, he generally prefers to keep as far behind the scenes as possible (hence Peter Lawwel’s role as… Read more »

IAN LAWLOR’S SHEKELS

Date: October 30, 2025 -

IAN LAWLOR, of private equity development funder Round Tower Capital, has been very vocal lately about the housing crisis, most recently discussing the imminent (?) revision of the Housing For All plan (“Another season, another national housing plan”) in newspapers and on the telly, where he has appeared on the likes of Virgin Media’s The… Read more »

GLENCREE’S BAIL-OUT

Date: October 30, 2025 -

GOOD NEWS for all the worthies in the Glencree Centre For Peace And Reconciliation. Despite the level of dysfunction exposed in the organisation in the recent past, its main funder, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), has decided to release over €¼m “on an exceptional basis”. When Goldhawk last looked at the carry-on in Enniskerry… Read more »

DESPERATE TIMES FOR DAN MACDONNELL

Date: October 30, 2025 -

EARLIER THIS month a creditors’ meeting was called for event marketing operation Neon Agency, founded by 100% shareholder Dan MacDonnell. This followed an attempt by brand consultancy creditor Image Now to have it wound up by the High Court and also after a Scarp rescue attempt had failed in September. On top of this, a… Read more »

ALAN CLANCY EXITS ONE CENTRAL PLAZA

Date: October 30, 2025 -

GOLDHAWK WAS surprised to see that bar and club supremo Alan Clancy has resigned as a director of the company behind his much-vaunted new venue – the soon-to-open Díon on the top two floors of the old Central Bank building on Dame Street (now called One Central Plaza). Maybe he just has too much on… Read more »

VOL 43 NO 22

Date: October 30, 2025 -

SOLDIER F GOES FREE

Date: October 30, 2025 -

SOLDIER F, recently acquitted of murder and attempted murder on Bloody Sunday, has returned to his comfortable life in England. He became a rich man in the 1990s after being awarded a series of lucrative construction contracts from the British government. In what is beyond irony – and the self-serving concept of British justice –… Read more »

BACIK’S RIGHT CHOICE

Date: October 30, 2025 -

FIANNA FÁIL’S latest poll rating of 17% has intensified Micheál Martin’s leadership crisis but another stat in the same poll is also linked to leadership tensions inside the Labour Party. While Labour was on a low, static rating of 4% in the same Business Post poll, its arch rival, the Social Democrats, was soaring to… Read more »

DONOHOE CROSSES THE RUBICON

Date: October 30, 2025 -

PRESIDENT-ELECT Catherine Connolly was accused by Fine Gael of insulting our allies in Europe by referring, accurately, to the military industrial complex in states such as Germany, so Goldhawk was relieved to see finance minister and Eurogroup president Paschal Donohoe using harmless – not to say meaningless – terms to describe the latest EU militarist-minded… Read more »

‘SPOIL THE VOTE’ PLAYERS

Date: October 30, 2025 -

RTÉ was quick to publish an article online before the election count was completed. While 213,738 spoiled votes certainly warranted analysis, RTÉ’S online article, “Who was behind the ‘Spoil The Vote’ campaign?”, did not examine the political agenda of several leading figures in the campaign. The RTÉ report outlines that Elaine Mullally’s posts online “often… Read more »

DENTON WHITEWASH FOR BRITS AND MI5

Date: October 30, 2025 -

A leak from the upcoming Operation Denton report on the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings indicates that the inquiry will exonerate the British Army and MI5, something long predicted by this magazine. The formal report is expected in a few weeks. According to the leak, the army is portrayed as honourable and trustworthy, so much so that… Read more »

TALE OF TWO RIOTS 

Date: October 30, 2025 -

FOLLOWING THE riots at Citywest, a series of articles contrasted the Garda response in Saggart to the Dublin riots in November 2023. These honed in on more usable riot shields, having a water canon ready to be deployed and a graduated Garda response plan. All this misses the point. After the 2023 riots, then justice… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: October 30, 2025 -

“I would have walked” the presidential election, said Bob Geldof. “I think I’d have walked the f…ing thing,” Geldof added. “I think I would have won.” Bob Geldof, The Journal In the process, he transformed the thin blue line into the Maginot Line. Paul Williams opts for a surprising metaphor in his glowing account of… Read more »

CONNOLLY’S CLIMATE CURVE

Date: October 30, 2025 -

Directly after the final TV debate of the presidential campaign, Prime Time presenters Sarah McInerney and Miriam O’Callaghan took part in a live RTÉ podcast, Behind The News. McInerney said a big challenge had been “trying to figure out what are we going to ask them that they haven’t been asked five million times already”…. Read more »

JOHN FITZGERALD’S EMISSIONS

Date: October 30, 2025 -

“I’m utterly gobsmacked at how much this article misrepresents our research and our position. This follows personal communication which should have clarified any of these misinterpretations.” This was UCC climate academic Hannah Daly’s reaction on social media to an Irish Times opinion piece last week. DCU climate scientist Paul Price claimed the article was “a… Read more »

NAOMI LONG UNDER THREAT

Date: October 30, 2025 -

In a BBC podcast on October 15, Alliance party leader Naomi Long said: “I think it would be helpful for the secretary of state to set out what the conditions for a border poll would be. What I think is toxic at the moment is, by not setting out the conditions, every single election becomes… Read more »

HOW LONG CAN MARTIN HOLD ON?

Date: October 30, 2025 -

The alienation of Fine Gael hard man Big Phil Hogan in 2020 was a source of some regret to then taoiseach Leo Varadkar as the ousted EU commissioner – post Golfgate – went on to subvert the standing of Vlad in FG, contributing greatly to the taoiseach’s exit from politics in 2024. Bertie is the… Read more »

SPECTRE OF CATHERINE AND MARY LOU

Date: October 30, 2025 -

THERE IS considerable trepidation among right-thinking people at the very large vote that left-alliance presidential candidate Catherine Connolly pulled last week. A distraught media put it down to Connolly being a much better candidate than Heather Humphreys and revulsion at the smear campaign against Connolly. There was also much diversionary emphasis laid on the high… Read more »

WHY SEÁN KELLY WAS BLOCKED

Date: October 30, 2025 -

FINE GAEL approached the presidential contest with quiet confidence last summer, with super EU technocrat Mairead McGuinness the clear favourite until she was forced to withdraw on medical advice. But the back story to why the FG leadership rushed to appoint Heather Humphreys as the party nominee and shunted a more suitable and capable candidate,… Read more »

‘SINDO’ V CONNOLLY

Date: October 30, 2025 -

JOURNALISTS WHO noted the Fine Gael smear campaign against president-elect Catherine Connolly in the run up to the election should not throw stones given that the defence given by political parties – slight as it may be – is that all’s fair in love and political war. But the media claims to have higher standards… Read more »