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EU ‘WAR ECONOMY’

Date: April 4, 2024 -

LAST OCTOBER The Phoenix quoted an impeccable authority on western political and military strategy – the Economist magazine – which warned that the imminent retreat of the US from the Ukrainian war with Russia would require the EU to fill this military vacuum: “Europe… has committed as much weaponry as America and far more financial… Read more »

DON’T MENTION THE WAR

Date: March 21, 2024 -

LAST WEEKEND’S article in the Irish Times by novelist Sally Rooney represented one of the relatively few public criticisms of the US’s policy on Israel by a high-profile Irish writer. Coincidentally, in the paper’s Ticket supplement the same day, there was an article by Una… Read more »

PROFILE: MICHAEL MCDOWELL

Date: March 21, 2024 -

MICHAEL McDOWELL was the stand-out personality in the referendums campaign and his elation at the count was visible as ‘no’ activists gathered eagerly around him. The same activists are aware that McDowell’s current agenda is greater than the binning of the constitutional amendments. The former… Read more »

THE YOUNG BLOODS: ROB KENNY

Date: March 21, 2024 -

HAVING GAINED an early profile through the social media site Snapchat, the canny Rob Kenny combines running a PR agency with being a social media influencer in the fashion and lifestyle sphere. The flamboyant 33-year-old is his own best ‘client’ though, as he rarely misses an opportunity to self-promote. Fans of Goldhawk will be aware… Read more »

RECOGNISING PALESTINE — AGAIN

Date: March 21, 2024 -

WORDS MATTER. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s statements criticising Israel’s war on Gaza have helped to muster world opinion against Israeli genocide there. But words should not be a substitute for real action and, despite a decade and more of rhetoric from Fine Gael and more latterly Fianna Fáil in Government, they have used various excuses to… Read more »

COMRADES STAGG AND PRESIDENT HIGGINS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE WHIFF of authentic sincerity marked the tributes of President Michael D Higgins to the recently departed ex-Labour minister Emmet Stagg and the two were definitely close comrades in the murky world of Labour Party power politics in the era of Tricky Dicky Spring. With… Read more »

IN THEIR ELEMENT

Date: March 21, 2024 -

“WE NEED to actually invest in developing our own stories,” declared movie producer Ed Guiney, pointing out that there “just isn’t enough investment in television drama in Ireland” in a Mail on Sunday article headlined, “Strike while our Oscars are hot!” As one half of high-flying Element Pictures, alongside Andrew Lowe, Guiney has been leading… Read more »

TRINA VARGO’S FAILING FUND

Date: March 21, 2024 -

US-IRELAND Alliance (USIA) president Trina Vargo’s statement last week on the “pausing” of the George J Mitchell Scholarship programme didn’t quite get across the abject failure of her entity to source funding. Vargo is the founder of the USIA and every year manages to generate oodles of publicity courtesy of the annual Oscar Wilde awards… Read more »

ROSS LEWIS’S RICH DISH

Date: March 21, 2024 -

AS USUAL, there was plenty of speculation last month ahead of the Michelin restaurant awards that Dublin’s swanky Chapter One might land a third star. That didn’t end up on the menu but the good news for owner Ross Lewis is that he has scooped a rather bigger prize. These days the Parnell Square restaurant… Read more »

VOL 42 NO 06

Date: March 21, 2024 -

NORTH HARMONY THREATENED

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE LOVE-IN between Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill and Jeffrey Donaldson’s puppet deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, should not fool people into believing that lasting harmony has overtaken the northern assembly and executive. Despite the recent shamrockery in Belfast and Washington, there may be trouble ahead with conflicting trends in northern unionism. Firstly, Traditional Unionist Voice… Read more »

SUE SPENCE’S SHORTS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THERE WAS no celebrating at Cheltenham for the well-connected businesswoman Sue Spence, whose Tranquil Sea did not make it on to the turf for the Boodles Juvenile Hurdle despite having been entered. No doubt, Spence had already celebrated plenty, having scooped an estimated €45m for her share of SoftCo – the company she cofounded with… Read more »

MULLINS’S ROUGH DIAMOND

Date: March 21, 2024 -

While Patrick Mullins’s victory aboard Jasmine De Vaux provided his father, Willie, with his 100th Cheltenham success, his faith in Ashroe Diamond in the Mares Hurdle proved to be misplaced. Before the meeting, a bullish Patrick declared that “no mare had yet beaten her over hurdles”, adding that “I’m counting on Ashroe to prove a… Read more »

TRIPLE LOCK TO GO?

Date: March 21, 2024 -

IT OCCURRED to Goldhawk on recently reading the Irish Times’s political editor, Pat ‘The Brigadier’ Leahy, that he had contracted gout on some mission abroad, such was the testy, belligerent language he used to describe Irish hypocrisy and blithe indifference to earth-shaking developments afoot. Amid… Read more »

DENTON NO-SHOW TO FOLLOW KENOVA?

Date: March 21, 2024 -

OPERATION KENOVA investigated a string of murders perpetrated by Freddie Scappaticci and his associates. It did not result in a single criminal prosecution. Scappaticci, a member of the IRA, worked for British intelligence. He died in April 2023. Operation Kenova was led by Jon Boutcher,… Read more »

CORRECTION

Date: March 21, 2024 -

In The Phoenix 8/3/24, it was reported that GC Aesthetics was being wound up. We have been informed that the operating company, GC Aesthetics, is unaffected and is “trading well… and fully-solvent”. The company now in liquidation is Global Consolidated Aesthetics Ltd and this winding up “reflects a restructuring at the holding company level”. We… Read more »

NATIONAL PARTY ‘MODERATES’

Date: March 21, 2024 -

DIVISIONS IN the far-right National Party (NP) emerged publicly last July due to a dispute over the ownership of more than €400,000 worth of gold bars, with two factions claiming to be the authentic leadership of the party. Early last month, a spokesperson for the Electoral Commission stated that a decision on which faction is… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: March 21, 2024 -

The whole programme is a bit like a Japanese bullet train whizzing from Osaka to Tokyo. Pat Spillane on the All-Ireland football season, Irish Independent It is fitting that he does have such a prominent role in the ESB because really his role now is about illuminating a dark past and charting a course to… Read more »

DISSIDENT DRUMS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE MOOD at dissident republican Easter commemorations this year is likely to be subdued with no sustained armed campaign under way, while the electoral rise of Sinn Féin seems irresistible. Last Easter a few hundred republicans marched through west Belfast for the annual National Republican Commemoration Committee Easter commemoration. The main address was delivered by… Read more »

CRUELLA VON DER LEYEN BACKS BIG AG

Date: March 21, 2024 -

Fresh from giving Israel carte blanche to commit murder and mayhem in Gaza with the EU’s unconditional backing, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen did her own Cruella de Ville impression last month by scrapping plans to cut pesticide usage across the EU. Under… Read more »

TIMBER!

Date: March 21, 2024 -

Joy was unconfined in environmental circles with the revelation earlier this week that Coillte, the state-owned forestry agency, was to turn over a new leaf and switch its focus towards biodiversity protection. “Now is the time for us to hold up our hands and admit that we’ve been part of the problem for too long,”… Read more »

LISA: ‘NON, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN’

Date: March 21, 2024 -

WAS THERE ever a more controversial ‘no’ vote by one individual in a referendum? The last-minute decision of Fianna Fáil Seanad leader Lisa Chambers to vote ‘no’ in the recent referendums has become the main talking point in the post mortem analysis of the disastrous Government campaign on the recent referendums. But while ‘yes’ campaigners… Read more »

FINTAN O’TOOLE’S FUTURE

Date: March 21, 2024 -

RECENTLY RETIRED Irish Times seer Fintan O’Toole will surely feel compelled to do what he has been threatening to do for some years now, namely stand for election to the Dáil. As he has argued in the past, the point is not to merely protest but to act to change things. In fact, O’Toole has… Read more »

LEADERSHIP PARANOIA IN GOVERNMENT

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE WELTER of criticism levelled at integration minister Roderic O’Gorman about the near Gaza-like conditions of Tent City in Dublin’s Mount Street was led not by the opposition but by Government politicians last week. How strange. Or perhaps not. Fine Gael’s higher education minister, Simon Harris, and Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan took aim at… Read more »

ANOTHER KENNEALLY SCANDAL

Date: March 21, 2024 -

CHILD ABUSER Bill Kenneally, a member of the well-known Fianna Fáil family, is in jail for multiple child sex offences committed between 1979 and 1990. He is currently the subject of a full-blown Commission of Inquiry, headed by retired judge Michael White. Although he admitted his abuse to a senior garda in 1987, Kenneally waited… Read more »

BAD ADVICE

Date: March 21, 2024 -

ROLL OF honour or street of shame? A hefty, three-page catalogue of the Government’s 68 advisors, national handlers and media manipulators drawn up by seven of the Irish Times’s finest was published last weekend. Introduced as a “Who’s who of the people behind the power”, they are described as well paid (two-thirds are on over… Read more »

ARAGE IMAGERY SLAMMED

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE BUSINESS POST provoked a storm on X recently with a studious and well-meaning article on immigration and how to blunt efforts by the far right to grow its appeal. Unfortunately, the imagery accompanying the piece attracted far more attention than Aidan Regan’s article, even though it was a sober assessment of Ireland’s underdeveloped state… Read more »

PEDRO DE AZAMBUJA’S DOUBLE FAULTS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

WITH AN asking price of no less than €5.5m, the Georgian Kilquade Hill House outside Greystones in Co Wicklow is one of the pricier piles to come on the market in recent times. According to the Irish Times, this “manageable sporting estate” on five acres was “totally transformed” over a three-year period with the help… Read more »

IRISH OSCAR PLOT SPOILERS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

Despite all the hoopla around the successful Oscar run by Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer and Element Pictures’ Poor Things, the delirious hacks have managed to remain undistracted by inconvenient plot spoilers, such as the fight for long-suffering Irish performers to be given contracts on a par with UK and US actors working in Ireland on… Read more »

VICKI NOTARO’S FANS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

NO SURPRISE to see well-connected former VIP Publishing boss Vicki Notaro attracting some high-level plugs for her upcoming debut novel, Reality Check. These include the likes of fellow Penguin imprint author Paul Howard (“Absolutely hilarious”) and Sarah ‘Aisling’ Breen (“Escapism at its finest!”). Breen is formerly of Stellar magazine, part of the VIP stable. Reality… Read more »

WRECKING BALLS-UP

Date: March 21, 2024 -

BARRY CONNELL’S short-priced ante-post favourite for Cheltenham’s Arkle Chase, Marine Nationale, was ruled out of Cheltenham following his flop at the Dublin Racing Festival last month. Of course, he also has William Munny – “the best bumper horse in Ireland” – but left the horse at home last week, earmarking him for the Punchestown Festival…. Read more »

JOHN MOREHART’S WILDFOWL

Date: March 21, 2024 -

JOHN MOREHART, squire of the splendid Bellamont House and its 1,000 acres outside Cootehill, Co Cavan, has been getting busy again. It will be recalled (see The Phoenix 8/3/24) that the loaded American lawyer has not been shy when it comes to objecting to issues in his neck of the woods. He had a rare… Read more »

ANTI-DOPING INITIATIVE

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE IRISH Horseracing Regulatory Board and the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) recently joined forces in an anti-doping initiative. Citing “out-of-competition testing” as a critical component of any strategy, tests will be performed through joint operations in Ireland and Britain. One area sure to attract attention is the cost to taxpayers, given that Irish personnel will… Read more »

GENE MURTAGH’S STRANGE STRATEGY AT KINGSPAN

Date: March 21, 2024 -

SHORTLY BEFORE the company’s latest PR debacle at the hands of the EU, Kingspan CEO Gene Murtagh announced a strategy involving the commitment of €750m to enter the American roofing and waterproofing market. This could well prove another of the follies that have characterised some of the big moves by the Murtagh family-dominated insulation group…. Read more »

RISING CAIRN HOMES SHARES STILL UNDERVALUED

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE HOUSING crisis continues to dominate politics but, were it not for the raising of almost €1bn in equity between Cairn Homes and Glenveagh, the current state of affairs would be an awful lot worse. In particular, Michael Stanley’s Cairn Homes delivered 1,741 new homes last year, up from 1,526 in 2022, bringing the total… Read more »

JOHN PAUL KEANE’S CONNECTIONS

Date: March 21, 2024 -

THE LUXEMBOURG-based Irish financier John Paul Keane has been attracting a fair degree of media attention as a result of teaming up with one Conor McGregor. He has also had strong business connections in the past with another Irish millionaire, Michael Enright, who has had mixed fortunes since cashing in his hugely profitable logistics business…. Read more »