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ADAMS’S OPPONENT’S ‘LAWFARE’ SKILLS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

MUCH OF the Irish Times’s summary of Gerry Adams’s successful defence against a civil case alleging multiple IRA actions reflected the angry statement by the victims’ lawyers, McCue Jury solicitors. But in analysing the result – disastrous from McCue and its clients’ perspective – the paper’s Ireland and Britain editor, Mark Hennessy, did point out… Read more »

PROFILE: EOIN LENIHAN

Date: March 26, 2026 -

MOST IRISH people who have come across Eoin Lenihan would reference the publication of his Vandalising Ireland: How the Government, NGOs, Academia and the Media Are Engineering a New Globalist Ireland, which hit bookshops last October. However, any search online relating to the Clare author or his pseudonym, Progdad, reveals Lenihan’s involvement for almost a… Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: REX RYAN

Date: March 26, 2026 -

DUBLIN ACTOR and theatre producer Rex Ryan has proven to be a chip off the old block when it comes to courting publicity and having friends in high places. The son of the late RTÉ radio and TV presenter, Gerry Ryan, who died suddenly in 2010 and was no stranger to controversy himself, Rex (36)… Read more »

PAT KENNY’S CANDOUR

Date: March 26, 2026 -

NEWSTALK’S WEEKEND mornings radio host, Pat Kenny, earned plenty of positive coverage for his Sindo interview with Niamh Horan earlier this month. He had lots to say, including about those who parted ways with super-agent Noel Kelly. In the Irish Times, Hugh Lenihan was most impressed with “Kenny’s candid take on radio shake-up”, welcoming the… Read more »

JESSIE’S PLOT SPOILER

Date: March 26, 2026 -

Predictably, at Oscars time, there’s a bandwagon to be jumped upon when one of our own grabs a gilded statuette but further down the pecking order, plus ça change… A cursory glance over the 16 years of Jessie Buckley’s rise, however, shows not a single work from the Irish film and TV industry. Yet Screen… Read more »

JAMES DYSON’S OPERA CREDENTIALS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

WITH THE annual Blackwater Valley Opera Festival (BVOF) set to kick off in May and most of the tickets for the productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni already sold (between €120 and €220 a pop), Goldhawk spies the arrival on the board of billionaire investor and businessman James Dyson. Jimbo’s Ballynatray House was already earmarked as… Read more »

PETER JACKSON’S SHORTENING ODDS AT FLUTTER ENTERTAINMENT

Date: March 26, 2026 -

BARELY SIX months after Flutter Entertainment’s shares peaked at $3.09, when the company was valued at $54.4bn, the stock is now down at just over $1, with the market capitalisation falling to $19bn. This level of equity destruction represents a record for an Irish business and, in these circumstances, the position of Flutter CEO Peter… Read more »

PHILIP FARRELLY’S BUSINESS CASE

Date: March 26, 2026 -

WHILE THERE has, not surprisingly, been widespread coverage this week of the demolition of Chris and Rose Murray’s sprawling pile in Co Meath, another impending demolition is set to make headlines. This other high-profile saga has also been a long-running one and Philip Farrelly has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent Fingal County Council… Read more »

JOHN MOONEY’S SABOTAGE WARNINGS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

WEEK BY week the Irish media, keen to prove its virility, ratchets up the prevalent war hysteria with lurid and rarely verified reports of Russian and/or Chinese depravity. A recent front-page Sunday Times report is a prime example. Writing on the dangers for EU leaders during Ireland’s presidency, John Mooney warns that our infrastructure was… Read more »

COLIN WALLACE’S COVERT TRUTH

Date: March 26, 2026 -

Colin Wallace, a former psychological operations officer in the British Army, is pursuing a legal action to compel the British government to reveal the truth about the covert operations in which he was involved during his time in NI. Wallace was posted to HQNI and also to the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) in the 1970s…. Read more »

VOL 44 NO 06

Date: March 26, 2026 -

CHARLIE KELLY’S SCIENCE LESSON

Date: March 26, 2026 -

GOLDHAWK WOULD like to congratulate Charlie Kelly, the entrepreneurial boss of the Explorium science centre in Sandyford, south Co Dublin. He has come up with a whizzer of an idea to sort out the spat over the location of the proposed multimillion-euro National Children’s Science Centre (NCSC). And it just might work out rather nicely… Read more »

KEEPING TABS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

LOOKS LIKE the trusting souls in justice are taking no chances when it comes to commissioning a book on the first 50 years of the department, 1918-68. The numerous layers of control – sorry, supervision – of the tome can be calculated by the structures surrounding it. The department will appoint the book’s researcher; the… Read more »

RED FACES AT BLUE HAVEN

Date: March 26, 2026 -

AN ATTEMPTED corporate rescue of the so-called Blue Haven ‘Collection’ in Kinsale has flopped and it looks like there could be a fair few creditors lining up behind the taxman, who is understood to be owed big bucks. The good news for the players involved is that ownership of the business and associated assets in… Read more »

KINCORA SURVIVOR’S MANY BATTLES

Date: March 26, 2026 -

Richard Kerr, a survivor of sex abuse that he suffered at Kincora Boys’ Home, will commence his legal action against the NI state before the High Court in Belfast next month. Kerr was among the boys trafficked to Lord Mountbatten in Sligo. An Garda Síochána has refused to release visitor logs from August 1977, the… Read more »

PROTECTING PAUL COLLINS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

BANDON DEVELOPER Paul Collins has been a controversial figure for many years, courtesy of his companies involvement in the International Protection Accommodation Service (Ipas). He fronts Remcoll Capital, where there is an awful lot of red ink and one of the businesses in the group has just applied for protection from creditors. Collins has made… Read more »

AUSTRALIAN NAZI’S OFFALY OFFENDED 

Date: March 26, 2026 -

The recent appearance of Offaly man Graham Connolly on a livestream by Canadian antisemite and holocaust denier Alex Vriend goes to show how well networked far-right activists have become. Although Connolly is based in Australia, the show demonstrates that he maintains an active interest in developments in Ireland. Vriend – a leading member of Canada’s… Read more »

VRAI’S PADDY’S DAY BASH FOR US ARMY

Date: March 26, 2026 -

The deepening crisis in the Middle East this month did not deter Irish company VRAI Simulation from pursuing business opportunities with the United States Army. As the US and Israeli war on Iran entered its third week, VRAI hosted a St Patrick’s Day event at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the headquarters for US Army’s aviation branch…. Read more »

BAR COUNCIL WARNS AGAINST COST CAP

Date: March 26, 2026 -

LAST MONTH the Law Library held a diplomatic conference for Government members and their advisors on The Accelerating Infrastructure Report and Action Plan. The olive branch was offered to Government representatives following a six-week consultation on the report, which was scheduled by the Government over Christmas and new year. That timing prompted the Bar of… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: March 26, 2026 -

[Micheál Martin has seen] more of that green thread woven through the great tapestry of the great United States from the very, very beginning, [and the] forever romance between Ireland and the United States. Ambassador of Ireland to the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason It is a recovery of voice through which I situate parts… Read more »

GORDON LYONS’S IDENTITY CRISIS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

THE GOVERNMENT intends to make the most of the Irish diaspora’s connections to the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. Last September the Government became a formal international partner of the US Semiquincentennial Commission (America250 Commission). There is a programme of events on the Government’s website that details the role Irishmen (and they… Read more »

GOLDEN HANDCUFFS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

The Court of Appeal in the north has ruled that the PSNI has 30 days to provide data to the information commissioner relating to a 2017 Freedom of Information request for records about aid that the PSNI is granting to gold mining firms. Three of the north’s most senior judges rejected the PSNI’s arguments that… Read more »

CRUELLA MISSING FROM STORY

Date: March 26, 2026 -

THERE WAS a strange aspect to last weekend’s Sunday Times coverage of the tragedy of children dying from scoliosis due to delays in surgery. Goldhawk had been covering a political dimension to this ongoing story. Fine Gael party boss and Tánaiste Simon Harris, as health minister in 2017, had declared that no such child would… Read more »

JAMES LAWLESS V JIM O’CALLAGAHAN

Date: March 26, 2026 -

UNDERNEATH THE apparent calm of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party after leader Micheál Martin’s near-death (political) experience in the presidential fiasco, the unrequited ambitions of various leadership pretenders remain undiminished. One of these is higher education minister James Lawless, who presents as the party’s technocrat par excellence, with phrases such as “research and innovation policy… Read more »

QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY IRISH VOTE

Date: March 26, 2026 -

Students at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) have voted overwhelmingly to restore Irish-language signage along with English-language signs throughout the university’s campus. Of the students who voted, 92% voted to restore the signage taken down 30 years ago. The signs were taken down following a unionist campaign, which argued that such signage discouraged unionists from applying… Read more »

LEFT WAVE CRASHING

Date: March 26, 2026 -

THERE ARE two myths about Galway City, the heartland of the Galway West constituency, that could trip up the Wave of the Left, an alliance based on supporters of Catherine Connolly, Galway’s former TD who went on to become President of Ireland on a wave of left unity last October. The first myth is that… Read more »

VIRGIN’S NEW MENU

Date: March 26, 2026 -

JUST OVER a year ago Virgin Media said the Government’s refusal to give it a slice of the licence fee was putting its “public service broadcasting” schedule under pressure. On the day it announced cuts to its public broadcasting shows and staff, it added that it would “continue to evolve our current affairs offering”. Virgin… Read more »

IRISH MEDIA’S NEUTRALITY BIAS

Date: March 26, 2026 -

THAT A barely literate – politically and otherwise – group of western warriors campaigning to abolish Irish neutrality should be composed of a micro group of academics is a little strange. That the same academic warriors should be platformed to the virtual exclusion of the hundreds of academic pacifists in Ireland opposed to the abolition… Read more »

SOFTLY DOES IT

Date: March 26, 2026 -

JP McMANUS and Willie Mullins were both highly critical about ground conditions at the recent Cheltenham festival. The apparent lack of watering prompted outbursts from both the leading trainer and leading owner. An “annoyed” Mullins targeted the course’s executives and threatened not to run his better horses there in future events should ‘soft’ not be… Read more »

ALI CURRAN’S TINY TEAM

Date: March 26, 2026 -

GOLDHAWK HAS previously highlighted the glacial pace of filling vacancies in the national cultural institutions. Sometimes this matters more than others and at Imma right now chairwoman Ali Curran might prefer to have a full complement given the legal standoff developing with culture minister Patrick O’Donovan and the OPW. Instead, the board remains half full…. Read more »

MULLINS V SKELTON

Date: March 26, 2026 -

WHILE TOP trainer Willie Mullins had another excellent Cheltenham, he somehow still ended the week trailing Dan Skelton in the British National Hunt title race, with the latter remaining a long odds-on favourite to lift his first National Hunt Trainers Championship. Mullins won a total of eight races, seven of which were Grade 1 contests,… Read more »

DECLAN QUEALLY’S ROUGH RIDE

Date: March 26, 2026 -

DECLAN QUEALLY generated plenty of Cheltenham headlines at the recent racing showpiece. The Waterford amateur rider, who assists his father, Declan Queally Sr, was bidding to follow up his Naas Grade 1 success aboard I’ll Sort That in the Grade 1 Turners Novice Hurdle, only to find himself in a high-profile fracas at the start… Read more »

SELLING BALLINACURRA HOUSE

Date: March 26, 2026 -

IS THE Ballinacurra House saga coming to its final chapter? Goldhawk’s spies tell him that the surveyors and engineers have been on site, although there is still no confirmation of the sale of the pile by the receiver, two years after the Kinsale estate was placed on the market with a €4m price tag. The… Read more »

MULRYAN’S HEAVY GOING

Date: March 26, 2026 -

SEAN AND Bernardine Mulryan have not had the best of luck recently with their expensive string of racehorses and the minted couple’s poor run continued at Naas earlier this month with the unseating of jockey Gavin Brouder from their charge, Built By Ballymore, at the final fence in the €100,000 Leinster National Handicap Steeplechase. The… Read more »

KELCY WARREN V GREENPEACE

Date: March 26, 2026 -

GOLDHAWK HOPES that recently arrived US oil billionaire Kelcy Warren is getting plenty of enjoyment out of his splendid home, distillery and airport in the south east, but he might need to boost security in case any pesky environmentalists want to protest against him following a judgment handed down across the Atlantic earlier this month…. Read more »

COLIN HUNT DELIVERS BIG AT AIB BUT TROUBLE IS BREWING

Date: March 26, 2026 -

AIB BOSS Colin Hunt must be very pleased, having turned in a most impressive pre-tax profit last year of €2.4bn. Even though this is down 11% on the €2.7bn turned in for 2024, it is a top performance in light of the European Central Bank (ECB) base rate halving from 4% to 2%. It also… Read more »