10 July 2025
Connoisseurs of the blacker forms of irony had a good week. Genocide architect Benjamin Netanyahu presented his arms supplier, Trump, with a copy of his letter nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Picture of the Week
Image from Maeve McCarthy’s Returning / Heritage exhibition at the Lexicon in Dun Laoghaire. The show focuses on her family home in the area and its surrounds - with the long gone Forum Cinema featured and a tour of the Metals via video. It runs until the 3rd September. Don’t miss one of our very best contemporary artists.
From the Trenches
A brief extract for Paul Krugman’s July 7 post on Substack - full article available on Substack. A chastening reminder of the nihilistic nature of Trump and his policies.
“Most critiques of the One Big Beautiful Bill have focused on the way it explodes the budget deficit while imposing immense hardship on lower-income Americans. Yet energy policy is also an important component of the OBBB, which basically tries to roll back the rise of solar and wind power — sources that have accounted for more than half the worldwide increase in electricity generation since 2015.
To understand how self-destructive that effort is, you need to know three things about the economics of renewable energy.
First, there are powerful environmental reasons to favor renewables over fossil fuels where possible. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the most important, because climate change is an existential threat. But even aside from climate concerns, the air pollution created by burning fossil fuels takes a major toll on health and productivity, which solar and wind don’t.
Second, a transition to renewables, which might have seemed like pie-in-the-sky, hippy-dippy stuff a generation ago, is now not just feasible but the only sensible energy strategy….”
A Musical Interlude
My Bedtime Reading
Just finished Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter and a fine rollicking read it is. A short book but sweetness in every sentence. As in his virtuoso first novel The City of Bohane, Barry has developed a convincing patois for the colourful collection of characters that populate the mining town of Butte, Montana in the 19th Century. You soon slip into it and it may enhance your word power. The novel is essentially a very twisted love story between the feckless Tom Rourke (opium addict and bum) and the restless Polly Gillespie - married to self-flaggelist and mine owner Anthony Harrington. Sex, robbery and Grand Guignol violence ensue. And the chase persists across the country. In Butte and along the way we encounter a plethora of colourful characters: saints, sinners and an extremely large killer. Plus there’s the addition of a cute palomino. You’ll be sorry when you come to the end.
Sports Highlight of the Weeek
As a Cashel-born Tipp hurling fan and very long-term and long-suffering supporter (back to Jimmy Doyle days), I don’t think I have ever enjoyed a win as much as last Sunday’s defeat of Kilkenny - old and bitter rivals. It was the usual blend of sublime skill and brutal challenges - with the ref only blowing the whistle for the most flagrant of fouls. He even allowed Paddy Deegan to get away with a direct pull on Andrew Ormond’s head without demur - a straight red card by most judges. Maybe he was unsighted, but if so, the linesman close by should be presented with a white stick and a Labrador as a matter of urgency. The emergence of young talent this year from the successful underage teams promises some fruitful years ahead. Though I suspect that a final with a rampant Cork this year may be coming too soon. The fuss about an extra point on the scoreboard affecting Kilkenny is just noise - that their sideline team didn’t know the score (literally and metaphorically) is nonsensical.
And in racing the Eclipse at Sandown provided further evidence that Ryan Moore is the greatest jockey around, getting an ostensibly beaten Delacroix a nostril in front of the favourite Ombudsman at the post.
Artists’ Archive
Another look at that great Cork maverick Maurice Desmond.
Poetry Corner
Derek Mahon is my favourite Irish poet - after Yeats of course. His last collection, Washing Up, contained A Word to the Wise which was both an address to Michael D. Higgins praising his achievements and a jeremiad railing against “feral capitalism” and the parlous state of the world. Published in 2020 in now seems very prescient. Here’s an extract from another poem in this final collection, An Old Theme, in which the poet approaches his death without blinkers.
I shall die soon enough on a windy night
not quietly but furious at the outrage,
kicking and screaming as the lights go out.
Never mind; contributing my own calcium
to the world soup with rosemary, sage
and thyme, I will have time to come
to terms with the elemental afterlife—
grimly, of course, if not without relief.