Editor’s Note: Having previously published Vaccination: A Matter of Trust with Caveats, we now anticipate objections from some readers to an article that may provoke vaccine hesitancy, at a point when rapid rollout to the entire adult population is widely touted as the only path out of interminable lockdowns. The author of this article, Dr. … Read more
In August of last year I wrote an article pointing to the impending consequence of the Irish government’s rolling lockdown policy, ‘The Perfect Storm’[i] gathering on the horizon over the country. By that I meant a significant second wave of Covid-19 – to hit this winter. I made that prediction based on the following factors: … Read more
The three mantra for this pandemic in Ireland are: wash your hands; socially distance; and wear a mask. Stated repetitively with suitable gravitas the guidelines have been internalised by most of the population. Fears around the spread of the ‘deadly’ virus are even driving people to police one another. The valley of the squinting windows … Read more
I am a father, a husband, a son, a friend, a doctor, an athlete, a traveller, a student and a citizen. Although just one person, I nonetheless occupy many nodes in the complex networks that make up society. These extend into the past, traverse the present and reach towards the future. Over the past few … Read more
it is difficult enough for the fishermen to make a living but because of inaction with seal culls, they are now suffering very seriously … What is needed is to dramatically reduce the amount of seals in our water in the same way as we have to reduce our deer population … There is no … Read more
No facts without Judgment Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Mr Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). These are facts the heart can feel; yet … Read more
A zoom panel discussion organised by Lindau, which included two other Nobel-prize winning scientists, provided Stanford biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt with a platform to vent his fury over the global scientific community’s flawed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as he saw it. In particular, he condemned Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson for failing to … Read more
On April 30th, acting Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed defended Ireland’s agricultural sector,[i] claiming we are the second most food secure country in the world. What Creed seems to have been referring to was an Irish independent article from October 2019, saying Ireland had moved from first place to second in a Global Food Security … Read more
‘We are alive in a time of worst-case scenarios. The world we have inherited seems exhausted, destined for an absolute and final unravelling’. So begins Mark O’Connell’s journey into our ever-darkening future. There are, he notes darkly, fascists in the streets and in the palaces, while around us ‘the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent’. … Read more
It’s Saturday morning and I stand exhausted in line for my weekly shop, having left home without breakfast to get ahead of the despondency that might otherwise keep me indoors all day, despite the incongruent sunshine. I know at heart I am mostly there in hopes of some semblance of normal human contact. The phone … Read more