The job of a reporter is never boring. No two days are the same. Sometimes they are totally different. This week I attended the Moynalty Horse Chase to gauge interest in the general election and the launch of a campaign by retailers who are fed up with the criminality they face on a daily basis.
On Thursday, I went to Dundalk to speak to neighbours of the missing boy Kyran Durnin. Someone who worked in a local charity shop said: “It’s surreal. It’s like something off a TV show.” The case has dominated the news since midweek with so many unanswered questions. If the eight-year-old was last seen in June 2022, why was that not reported? We are still awaiting answers to a case Garda Commissioner Drew Harris described as one of the most extraordinary in his more than 40 years of policing.
I hope you enjoy my selection of stories from this week.
1 The standout article in The Irish Times this week for me is from our Berlin Correspondent Derek Scally, who is also the author of a fine book The Best Catholics in the World. He asks the pertinent question that many people have overlooked while directing their ire at the nuns who ran the old Bon Secours home.
What I Read This Week: A vital read on the origins of the Troubles and Boris Johnson’s memoir flop
What I Read This Week: Adventures in Airbnb, more closed restaurants, and one unlucky goose
What I Read This Week: A bizarre Dublin conference and the human cost of war
What I Read This Week: An explosive story in Poland and a surprise budget grenade
“Five years ago I took a trip to Tuam with only one question: who were the fathers of the babies whose remains were found under the old Bon Secours home?
“A well-known figure in the town told me, with a laugh: ‘The fathers of those babies are the sons of the finest families in Tuam. And you’ll never get them to talk.’ A decade after local historian Catherine Corless revealed a discrepancy between 798 death records for babies with no burial documents, preparatory work is ongoing to excavate the remains beneath the former home.
“The hot moral indignation the Irish reserve for our abusing priests and nuns cools off when it comes to confronting our men who impregnated our women, often through abuse of power and acts of violence.”
2 Hardly a day goes by without me being ashamed of men in some ways for the things they do. The events in the town of Mazan in France surrounding the mass rape of local woman Giséle Pelicot have shocked the world.
3 This article by Anthony Coughlan gives the lie to the pernicious myth that there was “no alternative” to the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence which led to the deaths of 1,800 people and injured thousands of others.
Coughlan should know. He was there at the time of the civil rights campaign and can recall what happened.
As he writes: “Contemporary Sinn Féin is attempting to invent a respectable ‘myth of origin’ for itself, one where the Provisional IRA campaign was in some way the continuation of the 1960s Northern civil rights movement.”
Coughlan believes that the demands made by the civil rights movement were being met and public opinion in Britain and around the world was overwhelmingly on the side of the nationalist population in the North.
Coughlan writes: “In my opinion, Northern nationalists, and indeed unionists, would not be just where they are today if the peaceful civil rights approach had been followed from 1969 onward, but they would be, in fact, in a far more politically advanced position than they are at present.”
This is a must-read for anybody interested in the origins of the Troubles.
4 Dave Hannigan’s sports columns from the US are consistently very good and this one particularly so.
Mark Cuban is everything Donald Trump is not. The principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks is a self-made billionaire who grew up in a working-class Pittsburgh family. Unlike Trump who was handed a fortune by his father, Cuban’s fortune is self-made. A billionaire plutocrat like him would normally be expected to be a Republican, but Cuban is not and is one of Trump’s biggest critics. As Hannigan points out, his criticisms sting because Cuban knows what it is like to be a successful businessman and Trump is none of those things.
“A sporting plutocrat and serial investor, his resume is as speckled with glittering commercial triumphs as Trump’s is pockmarked by epic failures and shameful practices. Something the Republican candidate’s nemesis delights in pointing out.”
5 Anybody who has visited Dublin city centre since the pandemic will be aware that it is in deep trouble. There is dereliction and vacant sites everywhere. There’s also an air of menace and persistent antisocial behaviour.
The powers that be are aware of all of this, but what are they going to do about it? The Taskforce for Dublin established last May has brought forward 10 different suggestions, but as our Dublin Editor Olivia Kelly has pointed out, we have heard many of these recommendations before. The question is: how are they going to be implemented?
Podcast of the week
“Don’t believe the hype,” Public Enemy noted so sagely many years ago. Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo is the publishing phenomenon of the year generating levels of interest rarely seen since the Harry Potter franchise, but is it any good?
I haven’t read it yet but I really enjoyed the Women’s Podcast Book Club discussion of it featuring Róisín Ingle, her mother Ann and Irish Times journalists Niamh Towey and Bernice Harrison. While all agreed it was a brilliantly written book, the word “genius” was used once or twice, there were sharp differences of opinion about its merits.
The Book Club: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Best of the rest
As an author I am fascinated and appalled by the £2 million advance given to Boris Johnson for his political memoir Unleashed. What were they thinking? HarperCollins believed Johnson’s memoir could have surpassed Prince Harry’s Spare which sold 400,000 copies in the UK on the first day of sales. As this article in the UK Independent points out, Johnson’s book topped the non-fiction charts in the UK for two weeks in a row, but sales were a tenth of what Prince Harry achieved. Bestselling author Richard Osman says there are “piles and piles” of unsold stock in British bookshops.
Johnson had an interesting story to tell, but it wasn’t the one that appeared in his book.
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