Welcome to IT Sunday for June 19th, 2022 – your weekly briefing of some of the best Irish Times journalism for subscribers.
As the week began and the nation was still basking in the Republic of Ireland’s 3-0 victory over Scotland the previous weekend, Ken Early wrote about how a system switch has managed to get the Irish squad back on track. He also notes how the win has also seen a mood shift among the team’s beleaguered fans: “From wondering on the previous Wednesday whether Ireland would ever score again, many Irish fans walked out of the stadium on Saturday evening dreaming of a decade of domination. Despair to megalomania in the space of four days? The national team is once again functioning as intended.”
John Sharry offered advice to a reader concerned about how her “eight-year-old daughter has a friendship that can be quite intense”. The reader said her daughter “often talks about the other girl getting upset . . . The upset is happening more and more often. The cause of upset that I am aware of includes my daughter hanging out with or talking to different schoolfriends.” Not only that, but the other girl’s mother also gets involved and has confronted the reader about her own daughter. Read what John has to say here.
Elsewhere, Anne Harris wrote about how it isn’t easy to be Leo Varadkar, noting how “right now, on these islands, those who study these things see two leaders fighting for survival: Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar. Boris’s battle at least is in plain sight. Leo’s is hidden.” She says that, along with issues like the leak investigation, Varadkar must deal with the fact that, “unlike the queen, Leo doesn’t really do bread and butter issues like housing, which has resulted in terrible mistakes”.
As the cost-of-living crisis grows ever more intense, Fiona Reddan examined the State’s level of minimum wage and its relationship to “Rip-off Ireland”. She starts by noting that the rate of minimum pay in Ireland is the second highest across the European Union. However, just because it’s high, “it doesn’t mean that it’s even enough to compensate for the high-cost Irish economy”.
The world’s fastest-growing social media group announced earlier this week that it is to create 1,000 new jobs here. As TikTok expands its presence in Dublin, Arthur Beesly writes that questions still remain about the need for stronger laws to protect children on video-sharing apps, and examines if there any security risk from using the video sharing platform in Ireland.
It would take 44 hours to drive from Mariupol in Ukraine to Dublin. It would take 54 hours to drive from Aleppo in Syria. Both cities have been brutally bombed by Vladimir Putin. Civilians have fled in huge numbers from both. Why does that 10-hour difference place Mariupol in our neighbourhood, while Aleppo is outside it? In his weekend column, Fintan O’Toole questions if Ukrainians would still feel welcome in Ireland if they were not white and Christian?
In his column, David McWilliams writes the union with Britain has been an economic calamity for Northern Ireland. The North is the only part of the UK economy, apart from London, to have a higher level of income today than before the pandemic, the main reason being that it is on a different island, powered by a far more energetic economy: the Irish one. The protocol gives the North an opportunity to grow up economically and create a region with unencumbered access to the world’s main markets.
And finally, Roe McDermott advises a reader who has an ex-boyfriend in her friend group. A year after they broke up, he won’t come to any outing if she is going, and the reader is now sometimes left out out of invites if her ex is attending. “I want to reach out to him and have a conversation where we agree to just hang out and not let the past make things weird, but friends told me that’s a bad idea. What do you think?”
As always there is much more on irishtimes.com, including extensive coverage of the weekend’s sport, rundowns of all the latest movies in our film reviews, and tips for restaurants to suit all tastes in our food section. You can always check out more articles exclusively available for Irish Times subscribers here.
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Stay safe and well.
