Angeldubba

  Dublin’s north inner city is not a place you want to be assigned if you are a Deliveroo driver. These (mostly) young men of non-Irish backgrounds are finding it’s a war zone, where they are likely to be attacked, robbed, assaulted as they try, of all innocuous things, to deliver some noodles or a pizza.   The problem has been festering for some time, and appeared on the national news again this weekend. The chief elements are boredom and racism. Youths with nothing to do,  suffering from a large dose of Covid lockdown frustration, appear to have found the cyclists with the grey and green Deliveroo boxes on their backs a tempting target. Rocks are thrown, knives are drawn, money taken.    And now the Deliveroo victims, it seems, are fighting back. Simmering anger was stoked to a dreadful degree by the death of Brazilian man Thiago Cortes in August 2020. Although Cortes was killed by a joyriding car driven by teenagers, the suspicion that he was targeted as...

  Someone close to me has just gone through the obstacle course of a job interview. All the usual ingredients were there – excitement, fear, anxiety, ambition, fury, the agony of what to wear. And as I kept telling her, “everyone hates this. Only weirdoes enjoy job interviews.”   An interview is speaking to an audience, a guaranteed critical audience. Public speaking is close to numero uno in people’s fears –  recent academic studies of whether this is still the case found out it remains true, such as in Dwyer and Davidson’s 2012 paper, ‘Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death?’ (The simple answer was yes, though death won out in the end.)   I wonder what you think out there? Do you enjoy a job interview? The only circumstances I can think for that would be the case where you know it’s your job, one hundred per cent, so the interview is just the opportunity to dress up and tell the panel how really fantastic you are. Oh, and how the organisation should ...

  Because it didn’t happen to me….   It’s not true.   The only conclusion I can come to about people in Ireland (and elsewhere) who are still having house parties, refusing to wear masks, heading to the airport for a weekend in the sun – is that they’ll never believe it till they’re in intensive care with Covid themselves. And as we know, if they’re under 40, that’s a very small chance.    But I somehow don’t think the great unmasked are doing risk analysis or cost-benefit modelling about their behaviour. The Washington Post ran a (long but interesting) opinion piece last week headlined “The March of the American Kook”. The author, David Roth, eventually, got down to describing the actions of a group of people who organised an anti-Covid protest that caused Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, being used for a vaccination centre, to shut down for an afternoon. According to Roth ( defector.com ), the social media post spreading the call to arms for this protest said: “...

And so … The Irish government is to try to stop anyone leaving the country by air. The mechanism is a €500 fine imposed if the reason given for being at the airport is deemed insufficient and inessential by the police who are checking.     So, what does the alleged miscreant do once the boys in blue have stopped him (or her, or ze) and imposed the fine? Do they meekly go back home or do they just head into the Departures lounge?   Unfortunately due to the 5 kilometre limit I cannot go there and find out. But common sense – and the nature of the person who was planning to go for a couple of weeks in Torremolinos at this time – suggests that they won’t be for turning.    The legality of it all is interesting, too. A lawyer friend points out that the right to travel is one of the unenumerated (ie, implied) rights in the Irish Constitution. But whether that extends only to the boundaries of the nation or to travelling outside the state is a point that could be teste...

  I t’s this: how can a vast modern country choose for its leader a person who has no interest in their well-being and history, but only in his own power and cementing that for his family?   And the answer I give is – well, the people in that country cannot know what is going on. They can’t follow the news, or understand what their leader has done to the reputation of their nation. They must have low moral standards, because surely a person who announces without any compunction that unless they win, it must have been fraud is …. Rodrigo Duterte? The guy in Belarus? Vladimir Putin?   People might wonder why I care so much, but I’m not alone. Setting aside the millions of Americans (Joe is going to win the popular vote again) who are horrified by Trump, all over the world the disgust at his behaviour is widespread. And he is the leader of the United States, if not any more the City on the Hill, still a template, an example, a glorious place of achievement, variety and its o...

September 2020 There's a little pub on the quay front in Wexford town, called the John Barry. The building looks like it is a least a couple of hundred years old, and the type of place where the customers often might be of the same vintage. "Old man pubs", some call them, quite respectfully, of the senior citizens who frequent them, usually male, because they grew up in a period when a woman's place was in the home, or at most in the Lounge bar. Being Australian, I can relate to that. However from the historic accounts on the web, it's a friendly, lively little pub with great stout and live music. Music and drink, the twin reasons for being of the Irish pub. Well, the John Barry hasn't been open for six months now, and it bears the dreaded "No dine-in. Beer." tag.  So do hundreds of pubs across the country, an estimated 7,000 of them (for a country of fewer than five million). The government allowed pubs which serve food to reopen on June 29, having ...

True, the Irish presidential campaign has become very interesting in the past 10 days. Martin McGuinness's entry into the field was an attention-grabber: will the electorate forgive the past of this reputed IRA hardman, now a peacemaker and good buddy of the Reverend Ian Paisley? And the almost-Lazarus-like return of Senator David Norris to the contest was also in the category of truth frequently outstripping fiction  . But before that, the media hysteria over a pretty dull race between pretty dull candidates was already hogging broadcast hours, webpages and column inches. The reason, I think, is that many senior people in the media are in fact frustrated politicians themselves. They didn't have the ego, the guts or the money to get up there themselves and ask the masses to vote for them; but they are fascinated by the process, and love tracking (especially the downfalls) of the politicians who are actually doing the business.