Is it wise to experience Amazon’s Prime at its best?

Below is an Amazon online advert.

Obviously the PR company who designed the ad never saw or read 'Eats Shoots & Leaves', Lynne Truss’s book on The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Experience Prime at it's best

Putin’s Special Military Operation is not going to plan

It would seem Vladimir Putin’s 'Special Military Operation' in Ukraine is going nowhere. And in that sense his self-styled name of the war gives it an ironic touch. But the war is killing far too many people, both Ukrainian civilians and military and Russian soldiers too. It is now estimated that over 500,000 Russians troops have been killed in the war. These are not only from Russia, they are also from North Korea and Bangladesh. 

It is reported that Putin has now become paranoid about his safety and is running from one bunker to the next, while all the time Russian soldiers are being killed.

The Russian war in Ukraine is now lasting longer than the Soviet fight with the Wehrmacht, which ended with a Soviet victory.

Putin had expected a quick victory in Ukraine, it was to be done and dusted in a matter of days. His plans mirror with those of Hitler who expected to take Stalingrad in two weeks.

Mr Putin’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine is not going to plan. How long will it be before his generals tell him so?

The Ukrainian drone attack in St Petersburg yesterday is an embarrassment for Putin.

Is that the first attack on the city, then called Leningrad, since the German  900 day siege between September 8, 1941 and January 27, 1944?

It is also the birthplace of Vladimir Putin, who was born on October 7, 1952.

One of his two brothers, Viktor, born in 1940, died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the siege of Leningrad.

His father fought against the German invader. His maternal grandmother was killed by the Germans, as were his maternal uncles, who were killed on the eastern front.

Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon Putin was a personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

Surely a casebook study for any psychotherapist. The man might well be suffering PTDS

Not much consolation for Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, Russian soldiers too, being killed and receiving horrific life-changing injuries every day and night.

Russian dirty money laundered with London’s corrupt class

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper

Michael Commane

I’ve just finished reading ‘London Falling’ by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s a page turner. 

He is a brilliant writer and the work and detail he put into ‘London Falling’ is remarkable.

It’s a true story about a young man, Zac Brettler, who leads an unusual life and experiences a more unusual type of death.

There are many strands to the book. It’s first of all the story of how corruption is alive and well in London and how Russian oligarchs have slipped so easily into the dirty money that is no stranger to the English capital.

Rachelle and Matthew Brettler had two children, Joe and Zac. They are a family of the Jewish faith; Rachelle’s father survived the horror of Auschwitz  and Matthew’s father managed to get to England when he was 13, which naturally left scars on the families. The world must never forget what the Germans did to the Jewish people across Europe and indeed to those who did not bow to their evil ways.

The Brettlers are reasonably affluent, mother and father have professional jobs; Rachel a writer and Matthew a financier. Joe was born in 1999 and just over a year later Zac was born. 

The boys were competitive, with Joe being more academic than Zac, who did not gain entrance to Joe’s school, something that might well have helped sow the seeds of his eventual disaster. 

Do we ever understand or appreciate how our futures are influenced by those early years of our lives? Those nine months in our mother’s wombs play a significant role in deciding our destinies. And certainly our family milieu leaves indelible marks on us.

While Zac was not at a top academic school, his school’s roll book included the rich and super rich. At school he began to lie about his background, pretending his family were much wealthier than they actually were. 

He was a highly imaginative young man; on leaving school somehow or other he introduced himself to older super rich men, who were impressed with him. He told them his name was Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch, who had died and that eventually he would inherit his father’s fortune.

His parents Rachel and Matthew knew nothing about what was going on, though they were concerned about his behaviour at home and his comings and goings.

His new associates believed his lies but when they eventually discovered there was no money there, his body was found in the Thames.

Rachel and Matthew believe that the police left many questions unanswered. Was it that there was someone higher up telling the police to protect the Russian oligarchs?

And that’s what’s frightening about the story of Zac Brettler. On the other hand hasn’t most of  the wealth and majesty of London been built on stolen money and corruption.

Patrick Radden Keefe, with Irish ancestry, has written a masterpiece; a true story that warns us all never to be tempted by the lure of great wealth.

My mother always questioned how people could accumulate large sums of money in a short space of time.

'London Falling’ complements my mother’s thoughts. Please read it and find out for yourself.

A great holiday read.

Our love for our mothers is a special gift, Roy Keane had it

A quote from Roy Keane after his mother’s death in March.

"From a selfish point of view, we weren't ready for my mam to go yet... What a woman she was... Ultimately, our mam and dad were at their happiest when they were together, and they are together. God bless, mam, and thanks for everything you did for us. 

"You’ll always be the boss."

On this day, June 1, 1985 Dominican priest Paul Hynes died

I imagine most of us in our lives meet people who greatly impress us; they leave their mark on us and we consider them to be fine people. 

I was once asked by a group of Dominicans what criteria did I use to say someone was a great person. I half-seriously half flippantly replied, anyone I felt who liked me I considered them to be a great person. 

Today is the 41st anniversary of the death of Dominican priest Paul Hynes. He was 51 when he died.

Many people of my generation were greatly impressed with him. He was dynamic, always questioning, in touch with people, I imagine a prayerful person. And he could not tolerate all forms of BS, and let it be known

What would he think of the state of the Irish Dominican province today? What at all is he thinking about us as he experiences the Beatific Vision?

Only God knows, maybe he too.

We were told as novices all good Dominicans die in their 40s; maybe there’s something to it? He was close enough.

Maybe dying in our 40s we have less chance of doing all the wrong things, annoying and upsetting people. Do we get more arrogant the older we get? Maybe the opposite is the case and we have the sense to realise the world and everything to do with the world is far more nuanced than we had imagined. We can never see things in terms of black and white, or can we.

Personally I’d much prefer an easy faith to a solid one.

Paul Hynes had the ability to be tough, indeed, he was a no-nonsense man, sometimes, when required.

As editor of Intercom Paul Hynes asked me to write for the magazine. Cyprian Candon never did during his long tenure as editor.

What might Galilei think about the meeting in the Minerva?

The text below is from the weekend edition of The Irish Times. The blogpost heading is not the heading that appeared with the story on Saturday’s paper.

The Irish bishop behind the scenes of the Vatican’s work on AI

Paul Tighe has been a link between Silicon Valley and the Vatican in dialogues over the past decade and resulting in Pope Leo’s first encyclical

---

The Vatican’s response to artificial intelligence began a decade ago in the private library of a religious order in central Rome, where a group of top Silicon Valley executives gathered with senior Catholic officials below shelves lined with antique books spanning centuries of Christian thought.

The issues raised culminated this week with the publication of a landmark encyclical by Pope Leo XIV that summoned the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to work towards the ethical governance of a technology with a disruptive potential akin to the industrial revolution.

The meeting grew out of an informal encounter at a Bay Area conference in 2016, when a group of Silicon Valley executives including the LinkedIn co-founder and early Open AI investor Reid Hoffman approached a French priest, Éric Salobir, and asked how they could contact the Vatican.

“They wanted to alert us to something that was coming,” remembers Bishop Paul Tighe, an Irish senior Vatican official who was present at that first gathering in Rome.

“We had some very senior people, and it became very clear that this was genuinely taking off, and they were surprised at the rate of development,” Tighe remembers.

“That’s the thing that struck me at the time – the pace at which it was developing, and also the range of areas where it would be relevant . . . You realise that this wasn’t just going to have an impact in the narrow area of AI, but was going to be transformative.”

The tech executives were interested in involving faith traditions in general, not the Catholic Church exclusively. But conveniently, Catholicism had a “corporate headquarters” that they could approach.

That meeting in the Dominican library was the first of what would come to be known as the Minerva Dialogues, annual closed-door meetings between the Vatican and Silicon Valley named after the adjoining church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, built in the 13th century on the ruins of a Roman temple.

It’s a site that is heavy with history of the church’s relationship with science and technological development. Somewhere within the complex in 1633, church inquisitors forced the father of modern astronomy, Galileo Galilei, to renounce his belief that the sun rather than the Earth was at the centre of the universe, following his trial for heresy.

Those attending the Minerva Dialogues quickly came to see AI as a technological development that offered huge promise to humanity, but also something that carried profound risks.

“I remember being at a session where they were showing the potential benefits of AI in terms of diagnostics, in terms of individualised treatment plans,” Tighe says.

“But then it struck me at the time: yes, but if we don’t fix the equality of our healthcare systems, this is going to be great for some, and really just make more pronounced the inequalities.

“We gradually came to the realisation that AI has this extraordinary ability to magnify both what is best about humanity, and also our far less good tendencies.”

Key interlocutor

Held each year since that first meeting in 2016, the discussions brought together figures such as former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and chief technology officer at Microsoft Kevin Scott with senior Vatican officials, Catholic theologians and philosophers.

Tighe – mostly due to his native English, he says – ended up becoming a key interlocutor and co-ordinator between the Vatican and Silicon Valley in the process.

It was a strange, unexpected kind of return for the Meath-born prelate, who grew up partly in Sligo, where his father worked for IDA Ireland at a time when the agency began looking towards Silicon Valley as a potential source of investment into Ireland.

“It was funny, some of the names, even the name of Silicon Valley itself and some of the companies, I’ve been familiar with from home,” he says.

Tighe is a former teacher who worked in communications under then archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin. He was called to the Vatican in 2007 at a time when the Holy See was digitalising its public outreach and was involved in setting up the papal Twitter account.

Since 2022, he has been the secretary – second in command – of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, the Vatican equivalent of a ministry.

Over the years, his incongruous presence has been noted by media reporting from tech conferences such as the Web Summit and South by Southwest.

His work involved frequent travel between the Vatican and Silicon Valley, where a parallel process to the Minerva Dialogues was taking place at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, part of a Jesuit university in Santa Clara, California, and home to a research group on the ethics of AI.

“I met Fr Brendan McGuire, who was a parish priest in that area, an Irish priest who had worked in technology,” recalls Tighe. McGuire “had many parishioners who were working in the Silicon Valley companies, who were anxious to harmonise their work and their faith”, he says.

The issue soon came to the attention of the man at the top.

“Pope Francis, I remember he called me in for a meeting about 2018,” Tighe remembers. “He said he’d had a visit from a number of business people who had told him that the church needed to begin to have a more kind of deliberate reflection on AI. He wasn’t a technologist, you know, but he said, ‘Look, try and develop these contacts and keep in touch’. And then, gradually, he began to speak about it.”

The turning point came with the launch of the AI text generator ChatGPT in 2022, when the topic of artificial intelligence became a primary focus of the world’s attention.

“I greatly value this ongoing dialogue,” Pope Francis told participants of the Minerva Dialogues in a meeting in 2023, expressing hopes for “a serious and inclusive global discussion on the responsible use of these technologies”.

In an address to a G7 meeting in Italy a year later, the pope described AI as having the potential to make great advances for humanity but also to worsen injustice, describing the algorithms behind the systems as “neither objective nor neutral”.

A few months later, Tighe’s Dicastery for Culture and Education published a joint document with the Vatican’s doctrinal department, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Antiqua et Nova laid out, in 117 clauses, the culmination of the Vatican’s reflection on AI, its implications, and the ethical concerns it posed in various areas: employment, healthcare, education, misinformation, privacy, surveillance, the environment and warfare.

It stressed that there was no equivalence between human intelligence and its “imitation”, artificial intelligence. “No AI application can genuinely experience empathy,” it read. “AI’s advanced features give it sophisticated abilities to perform tasks, but not the ability to think.”

Within the first hours of the election of the new pope just over a year ago, it was already evident to close observers that artificial intelligence would be a key concern to his papacy. The clue was his choice of name: Leo.

The last pope named Leo was a giant in the modern history of the Catholic Church, remembered for shepherding it through a time of epochal change and for authoring what would come to be known as the church’s “social doctrine”.

The crucial text was Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, which addressed the plight of the class of urban poor created by the industrial revolution.

It defended the right of workers to form trade unions, but also spoke in support of private property, a middle way between unfettered capitalism and then-rising radical socialism that became influential far beyond Catholicism.

The current Pope Leo symbolically signed his first encyclical on the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum, and began it by saying he wished to “add my own voice” to the tradition it began.

Its launch this week was highly unusual, featuring addresses by a panel of speakers including the co-founder of AI company Anthropic, Christopher Olah. It was a first for the pope himself to make an address, lending the work additional prominence.

Epochal change

The encyclical describes AI as a development that is still evolving – “any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated”, it notes – but that clearly marks an “epochal change”.

It flags the risk of the “social calamity” of mass unemployment, worsened economic inequality if the technologies are kept in the hands of the few, the potential for discrimination in algorithms, and AI weaponry that could lower “the moral threshold of conflict”.

But the encyclical urges readers not to become fatalistically resigned, but to realise their own potential. “No one is without responsibility. We all have our own areas for action,” it reads.

A primary aim appears to be to boost momentum for some kind of binding international agreement – probably through the United Nations, which is name-checked in the document – and legislation to ensure the ethical governance of AI and to ensure that the technology is harnessed for the good of humanity.

The serious challenges in the way of such an agreement are also flagged in the document, which has a section called “the crisis of multilateralism” and states that the era of postwar co-operation has given way to “a disorderly and conflict-ridden multipolarism with a prevailing sense of mistrust”.

For Tighe, the church can point the way, but others have to walk the path.

“The church can say, ‘Look, this is what humanity should be aspiring to’. We can’t on our own bring that about,” says Tighe. “It is an encouragement for people who are working for that to feel empowered.”

Catholic Church needs to wake up to the world of PR

What is it about the Catholic Church that it is never at the races when it comes to PR. Is it arrogance or crass inefficiency? Maybe both.

And then the people they call on to talk for them in the media; most of them would bore you to tears.

It is awful and has been so for generations.

On May 12 someone wrote to the prior of the Carmelite Church on Dublin's Whitefriar Street. Some days later the secretary replied saying the email had been passed on to the prior. Up to yesterday no reply from the prior.

Below appears on the leading page of the Rathmines parish website. Inviting young adults to a meeting on Thursday April 23.

Join Young Adults Rathmines

April 22, 2026

Join Young Adults Rathmines (18-40 years old) 

on Thursday, 23rd of April at 7pm in Rathmines 

parish centre for their next event “Philosoforum” 

for discussions on philosophy and theology.

The topic of the evening is “What is Truth?”.

See you soon!

Got questions? Email youthministry@rathminesparish.com

A couple’s view on how Robert Prevost was elected pope

Interesting take on the lead up to the election of Pope Leo.

Has Robert Duncan a touch of an Irish accent; some of his vowel sounds are Irish?

https://youtu.be/XFsk0X2-NvE?si=WPJX2ixzWNzwy9s_  

The art of pothole spotting on the capital’s streets.

An essential ability necessary for cycling in Dublin these days is to spot the potholes and then the broken glass in the tiny cycle lanes.

Cyclist are modern day pothole spotters.

Once spotted they must be avoided at all costs but doing so in seconds the cyclist has to make sure s/he is not mowed down by a cyclist or vehicle.

It can be a fatal manoeuvre. And almost impossible not to scream abusive expletives.

Famous Volkswagen was started on this day in 1937

On this day, May 28, 1937 the Nazis established the Volkswagen company.

Hitler promised every German a VW. They would pay a monthly subscription, which they did but the car never arrived.

VW was revived after the war by British Army officer Ivan Hirst. Since then is has grown into the global brand it is today.

Volkswagen Group is a publicly traded company with headquarters in Wolfsburg.

The German State of Lower Saxony holds significant sahuaros and retains voting rights.

Porsche Automobil Holding is the primary controlling shareholder, which is controlled by the Austrian-German family Porsche-Piëch family.

Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the VW Beetle was the grandfather of Ferdinand Piëch.

Presumably the company does not celebrate with a fanfare its birthday considering  the notoriety/infamy of the founding members.

Through the station barriers, heading for work and then?

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

Every weekday morning at 7.46 I observe people disgorge off a train at Dublin’s Docklands Rail Station. 

Two minutes earlier the station is almost empty, and then just as the doors open throngs of people pour on to the platform. They swipe their cards, the barriers open, and out they go. The noise from the barriers resounds across the small station.

Two, three hundred people, maybe more, on their way to work. Most of them are young, few over 60, usually two or three with bicycles. Maybe some worried about their jobs in the current precarious tech industry. I imagine all going to work, most of them in a quasi hurry. Many with earbuds, they are mostly white but I’ve noticed in recent days some have black earbuds. Wondering is the fashion changing?

Docklands Rail Station is in the heart of the high tech world; I sit there imagining many of them are high tech people. Wondering why Irish Rail now call us customers rather than passengers; I don’t like the change.

Five minutes later I take that same train in the opposite direction.

I’m there with my bicycle, far from being a high tech executive. Watching them all for those three or four minutes forces me back to my ever-asking question, what is it all about?

The old question; do we work to live or do we live to work? Such a question is an insult to those suffering around the world; the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and their immediate families, the people of Gaza, the Iranians, and the close to billion people, who have not enough to eat.

Is it possible to survive in this word without love and job satisfaction? How can anyone stay home all-day-long doing nothing and yet what are we doing running about the place, intermittently thinking we are needed and important?

I’m told that God loves me but what exactly does that mean. Over the years I’ve heard so much talk about God and yes, I believe in God but how does that influence my life? I think I’m glad I’ve chosen the path I’ve chosen, at least some days I am. But I keep scratching my head and wondering. 

For the life of me I can never understand the institutional women and men, who sell their souls to whatever organisation they belong. We use the word apparatchik to demean people who play the party line, the party hack, the yes-people.

I’m back thinking of all those people rushing through the barriers at Docklands Rail Station every weekday morning. What’s going through their heads, what’s the meaning of their lives? What’s the meaning of my life?

Every time I hear those ticket barriers sound I’m thinking are we all simply apparatchiks.

It’s coming near the end of the school year and I’m worried how my students will do in their exams. I wish them well, I’ll miss them, hope they have great futures. I often look back at my former students, thrilled to see them happy and content. Maybe that’s the secret, staring me in the face, happiness and contentment. 

On Tuesday a tram driver reminded me, we come into the world without a worry. Wise words. I should take them on board.