Occasional Scribbles

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said he does not approve of any 'unilateral breaching' of Covid-19 regulations after Elphin Bishop, Kev...

Junior investment bankers at Morgan Stanley are about to get a €15,000 pay rise, bringing their salaries to €100,000. It is the latest Wall ...

The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today Michael Commane   I’m forever asking myself and others what is life about. Indeed, at this...

In the Weekend Review of last Saturday’s edition of The Irish Times Derek Scally wrote a review of the chancellorship of Angela Merkel. It i...

It often seems that Canon Law is applied to the foe,  interpreted for the friend.

On this day, July 28, 1942 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin  issued Order Number 227.   In response to alarming German  advances, all those who r...

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column Michael Commane It was reported in the media in mid-July that both the chief medical...

At a heated meeting in March of Germany’s 16 regional premiers discussing the coronavirus pandemic, the premier of Bavaria, Markus Söder sai...

Our heatwave may be coming to an end. A heatwave is declared in Ireland if there are five consecutive days of temperatures above 25 degrees ...

In 2019 Revenue collected €51.9 million from traditional betting and €40.6 million from remote betting. This was close to double the figure ...

Miriam Lord has a lovely piece in The Irish Times yesterday on Dessie O’Malley and it’s certainly well worth a read. At the end of her per...

At 07.57 today RTÉ’s weather forecast was read by Emer Flood. Another warm day ahead. 

The text below is from The Irish Times of Friday, July 16. The link is from Crux. Has the provincial of the Irish Dominicans made any statem...

In a special BBC Two programme last evening Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Dominic Cummings. He began by denying his current anti-Johnson camp...

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column Michael Commane I can’t imagine the damage Covid has caused the airline travel, inde...

Is priesthood fit for purpose in July 2021? Does one have to answer that, do they? 

So far 140 people, including four fire brigade personnel, are confirmed dead in Germany as a result of the flooding and that number will  ri...

The 'Thinking Anew' column in The Irish Times today. Michael Commane On July 1, the People’s Republic of China placed a full-page a...

British prime minister Boris Johnson was in Coventry yesterday where he was giving a talk on ‘levelling up’. At one stage in his ramblings h...

People are objecting to how Covid regulations are keeping pubs and restaurants closed. There are priests too, who are objecting to Covid reg...

RTÉ’s Prime Time last evening aired a programme on how county councillors can easily abuse the system for their own financial benefit. It in...

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column Michael Commane I put on a new summer shirt on Sunday and while unwrapping it I chec...

During the last 18 months of the Covid pandemic Irish households added €21 billion to their savings. In 2020 137 million bottles of Irish wh...

Jonathan Dimbleby’s ‘Barbararossa - How Hitler Lost the War’, published this year, has to be considered one of the finest pieces of writing ...

The editorial of the July/August issue of Reality , published by the Irish Redemptorists, carries an interesting editorial on the death of v...

Derek Scally in his book, 'The Best Catholics in the World’ points out that approximately 80 per cent of the Catholic population did not...

A link to ‘A `word in Edgeways’ aired on RTE Radio 1 yesterday at 06.15.  https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/21978750/

This is a post received on Monday and sent by Joyce2. It was posted on the obituary blogpost on Joe Bergin. Again thank you for continuing t...

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column Michael Commane There is a by-election in Dublin Bay South this Thursday. St Luke’s ...

On this day in 1954 the BBC broadcasted its first television news bulletin. We have come a long way in 67 years. On December 31, 1961 RTÉ Te...

According to US research for phone company TrueCaller, 59 million Americans lost money to phone scams last year. One in five admitted that t...