Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s dysfunctional health service crushes idealism and rewards cynicismWhy is the culture so resistant to positive change? Three historical reasons suggest themselvesTue Jan 10 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: We have taken flight from deep link with birds Birds animate our physical world but so many species in Ireland are rapidly winging it towards extinctionSat Jan 07 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Elevation of child poverty to national priority a genuine political breakthroughIn a country sensitised to child abuse, we seem oddly reluctant to accept that official neglect is also abusiveTue Jan 03 2023 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Half a century on we can see the benefits of Ireland joining Europe’s top tableState joined the EEC immediately after the bloodiest year in the history of the TroublesSat Dec 31 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: I don’t miss the Ireland that required us to marry in secretIreland’s present is not perfect but its past was grim, one of hypocrisy and economic failureTue Dec 27 2022 - 00:00
Fintan O’Toole: We are living with the possibility of no future, of civilisation coming towards its end‘2022 was a year when the post-lockdown dawn turned out to be the morning after the night before’Sat Dec 24 2022 - 06:00
Fintan O’Toole: Musk’s tantrum capitalism explodes myth of buccaneering libertarianismRampant egomania is not creation. It is not even, in the jargon of neoliberalism, creative destruction. It is merely destructionTue Dec 20 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The kids who were knowingly impoverished by austerity policies will pay the price for decades After the great Irish banking and property crash of 2008, the sinners got three Hail Marys but the innocent had to stay on their knees for five yearsSat Dec 17 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: We speak the cúpla focal of United Irishese Big difference between believing ‘in’ something and believing you are then required to do something about itTue Dec 13 2022 - 00:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland has had one big idea in the last 64 yearsIreland has been working on a model of attracting big US corporations, but the rules of attraction are changing fastSat Dec 10 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: In many ways the Irish State has still to create itself For the first 50 years after independence there were good arguments against the utility of the State; but then came two transformative momentsTue Dec 06 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Impossible to think of Cromwell in Ireland without acknowledging catastropheCromwell had the intelligence to understand the need for doubt but not the capacity to practise itSat Dec 03 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: State risks being complicit in conspiracy of silence unless it acts on religious orders’ recordsIf the public is liable for what the orders did, their records cannot be regarded as private. They’ve been paid for alreadyTue Nov 29 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Has there ever been such a concentration of sheer idiocy on the world stage?The World Cup has turned into a death rattle for the era when carbon was kingSat Nov 26 2022 - 05:45
Fintan O’Toole: Everybody found ways not to know what they knew about institutionally sanctioned abuseDecades of shame-filled silence lie behind delayed reactions to institutionally sanctioned abuseTue Nov 22 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland should not need heroines like Vicky PhelanState’s savage imperative of self-disclosure meant Phelan had to make her private illness a political matterSat Nov 19 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Time to revisit the role of John Charles McQuaidMcQuaid was rigorously consistent – in ensuring that abusers were protected from the law and allowed to carry on destroying young livesTue Nov 15 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Trump is like a vampire, sucking blood from the Republican Party to keep himself aliveBut Democrats have a big problem: Donald Trump will not go awaySat Nov 12 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Collective laziness of Irish legislators causes real sufferingThey are failing in their basic responsibility to pass legislation that protects citizens from abuseTue Nov 08 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The Irish are living an American dream. Or hallucination. Or delusionIn a staggering level of exposure 10 per cent of all tax revenue in Ireland is now coming from just 10 American corporationsSat Nov 05 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Government must wake up to the toxic narrative it is creating on homelessnessHomeless people should be treated as refugees in a radical conceptual shiftTue Nov 01 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Sunak will return Britain to the pre-Brexit world of slick rich boys savaging public servicesTheresa May was a Remainer; so was Liz Truss. Johnson didn’t give a damn about the issue either waySat Oct 29 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Who dares to speak of recent history?When it comes to the Troubles, many of the antagonists have a common interest in not looking too hard.Tue Oct 25 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Liz Truss farce was death rattle of the Brexit projectBoris Johnson turned British politics into a form of entertainment. Truss was a worthy successor in making quite a show of herself and her countryFri Oct 21 2022 - 16:46
Fintan O’Toole: The full, unexpurgated version of Up the ’RaUp cutting the legs off young women shopping for wedding dresses. Up torturing kids with Black and Decker drills through their kneecapsTue Oct 18 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Truss’ gospel of disruption is to move fast and break thingsWhen politicians start fantasising that they are the new Uber, they break people and democracySat Oct 15 2022 - 03:00
Fintan O’Toole: The more incomprehensible an event is, the greater our hunger for comprehensionThe paradox of living through the Troubles was that, at this level, fatal explosions were almost always caused – and therefore comprehensibleMon Oct 10 2022 - 13:35
Fintan O’Toole: Liz Truss’s hollowing out of Britishness surely alarms unionistsUK’s government may look like comedy act, but there will be nothing funny about way it kills off the welfare stateSat Oct 08 2022 - 05:15
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland is excruciatingly slow to use public money to help ordinary peopleBudget promises of €30m for IVF treatments and €47m for free schoolbooks are very welcome, but why have they taken so long?Tue Oct 04 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael decided to reshape Ireland as a nation beholden to private property ownersRory Hearne’s lively book Gaffs also covers the growing issue of hidden homelessnessSat Oct 01 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Prominence of Northern Irish identity will complicate a united IrelandIrish unity would require complex political and cultural arrangements in which Northern Ireland continues to function as meaningful entityTue Sept 27 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Fine Gael’s hysterical response to tax report is disgraceful and aims to stifle debateYounger, less wealthy people have to pay higher proportion of tax and FG wants to keep it that waySat Sept 24 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Monarchy is a bad habit. Up the RepublicBritain's sense of loss may run deep but the death of the queen highlights the merit of a republicTue Sept 20 2022 - 05:15
Fintan O’Toole: Vladimir Putin is losing his insane war on UkraineBut winter is coming, and it is Putin’s best ally. Are we in the West ready to withstand its assault?Sat Sept 17 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Enoch Burke’s transformation into an icon of freedom of expression is frankly hilariousTeacher demands respect for his own right to be who he is yet affords none of that respect to those who differ from himTue Sept 13 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Britain is becoming ungovernable and Truss will not last longLiz Truss knows that Brexit cannot solve Britain’s problems. That will make her an even bigger phonySat Sept 10 2022 - 05:15
Fintan O’Toole: Queen Elizabeth showed the institution she embodied could survive with herMonarch presided over death of her own majesty and replacement of consecrated mystery by sanctified celebrityThu Sept 08 2022 - 18:41
Liz Truss will make Johnson seem a political genius, May a mistress of empathy, Cameron a beacon of sincerityTory Party has chosen, not to wake up to the increasingly grim realities of contemporary Britain, but to double down on game of ‘let’s pretend’Mon Sept 05 2022 - 12:42
Michael Viney tells Fintan O’Toole about his 60 years at The Irish Times Six decades ago our Another Life columnist wrote his first article for The Irish Times. It was the start of a long relationship with the paper and its readersSat Sept 03 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: State’s failures make Ireland feel like it’s bursting at the seams, even though it isn’tThis country is one of the least densely populated in Europe - it is fallacy for far-right to claim it’s ‘full up’Tue Aug 30 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Southern hostility to northerners was the hate that dared not speak its nameIt is to be hoped prejudice concerning our northern brethren is a thing of the past — but anxiety about mayhem across the Border could returnSat Aug 27 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Robert Troy should quit or be sacked. Ireland’s fragile progress depends on itTD’s sins of omission may seem minor but the minister for gamekeeping cannot be a poacherTue Aug 23 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: No one was forced to read The Satanic Verses or watch show by notoriously offensive comedianWhat does freedom of expression mean in a world where being made to feel uncomfortable by a book or a performance can be presented as an innately bad thing?Sat Aug 20 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The first time I met Salman Rushdie, the very idea of it was unimaginableBy refusing to subsist in the living death they had prescribed for him, he stood up, not just for freedom of expression, but for life itself as the ordinary human birthrightMon Aug 15 2022 - 10:43
Fintan O’Toole: Irish society is about to experience levels of energy poverty unknown in modern timesAs energy poverty hits record levels, the Government is sleepwalking into a social disasterSat Aug 13 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Sinn Féin casts developer Tom McFeely as a villain and IRA man Tom McFeely as a heroParty casts developer Tom McFeely as a villain and IRA man Tom McFeely as a heroTue Aug 09 2022 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Recent record of the Irish construction industry is one long cowboy movieIf we can’t create a system that allows people to plant trees, what chance do we have of solving climate-related problems?Sat Aug 06 2022 - 06:10
Fintan O’Toole on Brian Friel’s Broadway flop-turned-Dublin triumphFintan O’Toole on the playwright’s fascinating record of a Broadway flop, starring James MasonSat Aug 06 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The old Irish way of doing things must become extinct — or else we willThe great skill of saying one thing and doing another is no use to us in the climate crisisTue Aug 02 2022 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: David Trimble was the only unionist leader to break Paisley’s noxious spellTrimble was a rarity in politics. He rose to the top by being seen as personally rather unpleasantSat Jul 30 2022 - 06:00
