Welcome to this week’s IT Sunday, a selection of the best Irish Times journalism for our subscribers.
Unprecedented turmoil in Westminster earlier this week saw Liz Truss resign after just 44 days in Downing Street, the shortest serving prime minster in Britain’s history. Another leadership race is now afoot with Rishi Sunak emerging as favourite this weekend.
Fintan O’Toole’s latest column looks at the events across the water and why and how Truss got into power in the first place: “Karl Marx said that everything in history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. So what do we say about the third time and the fourth time? The third time, in the revolving door of British prime ministers since 2016, was the Boris Johnson 24-hour nonstop vaudeville. The fourth was the Liz Truss demolition derby, a thrilling spectacle of crash-bang-wallop that does not last long and leaves the field strewn with wreckage. Johnson turned British politics into a form of entertainment. In that, at least, Truss was a worthy successor: she made quite a show of herself and of her country. So why did she get to be prime minister?”
David McWilliams, in his weekend column, also turns his pen to the mess across the pond and looks at how a once strong economy, forward-thinking and innovative, has fallen to such a weak place: “Innovation is the single most important factor propelling an economy forward. For many years Britain was pre-eminent in its ability to support and sustain creative scientific minds, via universities and public institutes, and this also included commercial support. The City of London took risks, betting on new companies and new household products, from vacuum cleaners to cars and washing machines, products that sometimes changed the world. The innovations may not have originated there but Britain produced industrial champions, it employed engineers, scientists and assorted tinkerers, the people who – through a process of trial and error – update, remodel and make the economy tick. . . It is tragic, and it is difficult to see how Britain gets out of the mess that successive governments have created. It is also hard to digest the enormity of the fall from grace. A country that used to be the workshop of the world is a beggar.”
The fallout from the Irish soccer team singing Up the ‘Ra in the aftermath of their victory over Scotland continued to rumble this week. Fintan O’Toole, however, has written his own full, unexpurgated version. “I am all in favour of people singing Up the ‘Ra. So long as it’s the full version intended by the artists rather than the radio-friendly edit. The original version is quite a work of art: Up cutting the legs off young women shopping for wedding dresses. Up torturing kids with Black & Decker drills through their kneecaps. Up 36 children under the age of 18 subjected to ‘punishment beatings’ in the 1990s alone. Up burying the body of a widow in a secret place and telling her 10 kids that their mother has run off with some man and left them.”
Elsewhere, the Central Bank this week changed it’s mortgage lending rules so that first time buyers can now take out a loan four times their salary. TDs are getting more nervous about housing - and they are right, says Cliff Taylor. “The Central Bank had reasons to change its mortgage lending rules. At the moment, many are being forced to pay more in rent than a mortgage would cost – the lending rules mean they cannot get a loan but there are no such rules in the rental market. The decision will have some impact on the market – but not a fundamental one. It is just another sticking plaster in a housing policy jigsaw which isn’t fitting together and where drastic problems in the rental market remain central. It will help some prospective buyers to get over the line in the short term – and, in turn, this temporary boost to demand will help some developers to get funding to finish out projects. But, as interest rates rise, fewer are going to be able to meet the stress-testing rules which banks are obliged to apply to mortgage borrowers – to ensure they can repay if interest rates rise yet further – and will remain locked out.”
With autumn once again in the air, third-level colleges across the State have returned to their lecture theatres. For parents, it’s an expensive time, so early preparation can pay dividends. In her personal finance column this week, Fiona Reddan looks at how parents and guardians should approach saving for their children’s education futures - beginning, it is advised, as soon as they are born.
Why do men allow themselves to be belittled as weak-willed sex maniacs? This was the questioned posted by Justine McCarthy in her weekly column, in light of the events in Iran, and indeed daily life for girls and women. “Girls are marked from birth because they are delivered into this world inside a package commonly known as a body, stamped ‘public property’. . . .While men were watching a bareheaded Elnaz Rekabi, the Iranian champion climber, ascend a competition wall in Seoul with deft and dizzying movements, were they not admiring her physical and mental strength rather than taking the fast track to hell at the mere sight of her ponytail? Twisted thinking has a ruinous history. Yet it keeps repeating itself. In Rekabi’s country, the “morality police” punish girls and women for the transgression of letting a fringe of hair escape from beneath their headscarves while Iran’s rulers send drones to Vladimir Putin’s invading army to mass-murder innocent civilians in Ukraine.”
In his column, Gerry Thornley writes that declining attendance is a major concern for rugby. “Rugby kept the show going during the dark days of the pandemic, albeit as Leo Cullen observed, games without crowds took all the fun out of it really. But the sport is still feeling the effects and is maybe even paying a price for doing so as well. . . Throw in the rising cost of petrol/diesel and travel, and the expense of the modern match-day experience, and it’s no wonder that so much of the rugby industry is finding the games a harder sell lately. Maybe they should start looking at other examples to reduce the cost of going to games, witness the Atlanta Falcons NFL franchise at their new Mercedez-Benz Stadium, whose price caps on 50 per cent of their food and drink for the last two years have proved a huge success with supporters.”
Earlier this week, Trish Murphy advised a person in their 70s whos in a relationship with a man 10 years their senior. The reader sought advice as they are worried that I will end up caring for him as I did for my mother and I do not want to go through that again”. You can read Trish’s advice, here.
And finally, in her column, Roe McDermott advises a reader who writes: “Four years on from a tough break-up, I still think about my ex every day. My friends think I still have a chance with her. She finished things four years ago, why should she have to repeatedly assert her position? But hope springs eternal and all that. What do you think?”
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