Fintan O’Toole: How Trump blew his first 100 daysUS president could have got cross-party support but chose reality TV-style conflict insteadSat Apr 29 2017 - 09:24
Fintan O’Toole: Church control of hospitals maintains myth of charityMaternity hospital debacle a symptom of public services as favours, not rightsTue Apr 25 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: An artful tale of Cork criminalsBook review: Lisa McInerney’s follow-up to ‘The Glorious Heresies’ is a well-made thrillerSat Apr 22 2017 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Brexit means Ireland must be the anti-EnglandSeeing ourselves as opposites used to be a bad idea. Now it might be a necessityThu Apr 20 2017 - 16:43
Fintan O'Toole: Review of Garda pointless until we change our idea of crimeThere is prima facie evidence banks carried out a huge fraud. Where are the Garda?Thu Apr 20 2017 - 16:38
Fintan O’Toole: Trump’s Syria intervention is for the wrong reasonsUS strikes are a result of the president’s belief that the world must be shaped by his moodsThu Apr 20 2017 - 16:37
The world's turmoil is down to boredom. Art can fight thisIn a culture that swings between tedium and hysteria, art is a democratic necessitySat Apr 08 2017 - 05:00
Fintan O'Toole: Nóirín O’Sullivan makes even Enda Kenny seem defeatistGarda Commissioner survives because Government is asking absurd questionTue Apr 04 2017 - 10:11
Fintan O’Toole: After Brexit, who will be UK’s Michael Collins?No one in the British government has the courage to be a true patriotTue Mar 28 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s love triangleWhen the UK triggers article 50 Ireland will have to do the thing it hates most: pick a sideSat Mar 25 2017 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Progressives must be the first to call out treacheryAfter Trump and the Brexiteers betray their voters, who will channel the anger?Tue Mar 21 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is still defined by the church’s mindsetA vast system of Catholic repression has left Irish society with four toxic habits of mindTue Mar 14 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: We are undocumented but they are illegalThere is tacit racism in the appeal to Trump to make Irish migrants a special caseTue Mar 07 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Kenny can either simper to Trump or speak upThe Taoiseach should speak as passionately as he did when denouncing the Vatican in 2011Sat Mar 04 2017 - 06:01
In the Trump era, artists need to do more than make protest speechesSteve Bannon – Trump’s brain – believes in a single US culture. His white-nationalist ideology gives that notion some sinister echoesFri Mar 03 2017 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: For Donald Trump, good news is bad newsJournalists must learn how to cope with a government narrative of danger and declineTue Feb 28 2017 - 04:00
Nothing changes because Establishment takes care of its ownAfter stepping down from Justice, Brian Purcell was handed a plum job at the HSETue Feb 21 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O'Toole: The Maurice McCabe affair is our worst scandal yetThe realisation you live in a State in which people with huge power over you will go to such lengths sends a shiver down the spineSat Feb 18 2017 - 13:38
Carnivalesque review: Neil Jordan’s cirque du supernaturalIn Jordan’s convoluted, overly elaborate fantasy, the best moments are the poignantly human ones, writes Fintan O’TooleSat Feb 18 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: McCabe also a victim of Irish hunger for toxic gossipThe Irish desire to be in the know makes it easy for abusive institutions to traduce whistleblowersTue Feb 14 2017 - 08:02
Fintan O'Toole: The smearing of Maurice McCabeThe explanation for the false file on Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe defies beliefSat Feb 11 2017 - 11:33
The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain review: He gave as good as he gotFor Fintan O’Toole, these ‘hard and enduring’ polemics are a testament to O’Faolain’s courage as a critical thinker in narrow-minded IrelandSat Feb 11 2017 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Trump never stopped being a reality TV starDrama and conflict are not mistakes – they are the lifeblood of the genre he inhabitsTue Feb 07 2017 - 09:04
Fintan O’Toole: Welcome to TrumpericaDonald Trump’s chaotic signing of grandiose orders has the air of a deluded despot’s last days, not his firstSat Feb 04 2017 - 05:55
Olwen Fouéré and the Breton connection: This time it’s personalA leading light of the Irish avant-garde conjures up her father’s wartime experiencesFri Feb 03 2017 - 13:00
Fintan O’Toole: DUP has done the most for a united IrelandUnionist party’s idiocy and sleazy behaviour threatens Northern Ireland’s foundationsTue Jan 31 2017 - 08:15
Fintan O’Toole: Brexit resurrects the English cult of heroic failureMove to leave the EU feeds into the British taste for celebrating disasters as triumphsTue Jan 24 2017 - 09:08
Fintan O’Toole: President Donald Trump is an authoritarian and anarchistUS president’s cabinet is like a punk band with members chosen for inability to performFri Jan 20 2017 - 20:00
Fintan O’Toole: DUP must be punished for its Brexit follyNever mind ‘cash for ash’, the party has trashed Northern Ireland’s vital interestsTue Jan 17 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Martin McGuinness, a hard man to replaceAs deputy first minister he showed the same determination with which he led the IRASat Jan 14 2017 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole on Maeve Brennan: No fairy tale endingFirst published on January 1st, 1998, this essay helped revive interest in a once neglected but now highly-regarded Irish writerFri Jan 13 2017 - 06:00
TK Whitaker, supreme mandarin and good citizen - Fintan O’Toole’s assessmentIreland’s greatest conservative revolutionary forced the state to alter the way it saw itselfTue Jan 10 2017 - 07:21
Fintan O’Toole: the alt-right is old fascism in new clothesLike most viruses, fascism adapts to changing environments and it’s just as deadlyTue Jan 10 2017 - 04:00
Fintan O’Toole: Silence is a weapon for fighting oblivionFor the Irish, silence is a way of dealing with, and surviving, traumatic exileFri Jan 06 2017 - 13:00
Fintan O’Toole: Irish banks have got away with major fraudGardaí have yet to investigate how thousands were tricked into switching mortgagesTue Jan 03 2017 - 09:56
2017: Fintan O’Toole plays optimist and pessimistIt could be the year of anarcho-authoritarianism – or the world may come to its sensesSat Dec 31 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Anthony Cronin, a true man of lettersBut his standing as a public intellectual is coloured by his relationship with HaugheyWed Dec 28 2016 - 16:47
Fintan O’Toole: We should imagine the abyss so we don’t fall into itWe live in a post-postwar world but the lessons of history must not be forgottenTue Dec 27 2016 - 05:00
Four Sides Full review: delicate portrait that spills out of its frameFintan O’Toole on poet Vona Groarke’s elegant, moving meditation on the pain of lost loveSat Dec 24 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole’s cultural highlights: ‘A great year for the elderly’Culture review 2016: Seanad National Museum land grab shows depths of philistinism in our political cultureThu Dec 22 2016 - 09:27
Fintan O’Toole: The Irish Christmas is a fiction of homeBeneath the seasonal franticity is something fragile, fleeting and preciousTue Dec 20 2016 - 11:03
‘Post-truth’ should not be the word of 2016Technology has helped big lies breed and multiply. Grand-scale political lying can go hand in hand with violence, oppression and catastropheSat Dec 17 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Still no shame in helping yourself to other people’s moneyINM pensions scandal shows there is no unacceptable face of Irish capitalismTue Dec 13 2016 - 05:00
Collected Plays by Brian Friel review: 29 survivors of their maker’s cullsA fine edition gives some of the great playwright’s murdered darlings a second chanceSat Dec 10 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Tax U-turns make eejits of compliant citizensTime and again, those of us who pay property and water taxes are made to feel like foolsTue Dec 06 2016 - 05:00
Seanad has learned nothing from its near death experienceUpper chamber’s arrogance shows nothing but contempt for the National MuseumsFri Dec 02 2016 - 14:00
An Irish Trump? He's called Michael O'LearyThe Ryanair boss could sweep to power with help from complacent establishmentTue Nov 29 2016 - 08:33
Fintan O’Toole: social injustice grew during austerityIreland was one of the worst EU countries at preserving fairness in face of recessionTue Nov 22 2016 - 06:25
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre review: The best single volume on the subjectThe handbook rightly fixes Dion Boucicault as a founding figure and brings Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw back into the frameSat Nov 19 2016 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland must join the fight for decencyThe EU, as bad as it is, is the only bloc left that can reassert open democracyTue Nov 15 2016 - 01:00
