Danny Boy
by Daniel O'CarrollRSS 
Recent Posts
- National hero Donal Walsh loses battle with cancer - teen's optimism and courage inspired thousands
- Irish professor with multiple sclerosis Marie Fleming loses landmark right-to-die case in Irish Supreme Court
- Irish government cracks down on scam motorists - stamp out loopholes to scrub penalty points
- Terminally ill Irish teen Donal Walsh makes emotional plea to end youth suicide - VIDEO
- Drunk Irish teen charged with threatening to kill Guyanan president - 17-year-old told bodyguards he'd like to shoot Donald Ramotar
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Firstly, please excuse my usual pessimism, but as I’m sure a lot of my fellow passengers on tomorrow’s flight from Kennedy to Shannon must be thinking: do we really have to come home?
Just in case I did have fond thoughts of returning back to the old sod after two weeks of lounging in Florida, though, Google News convinced me otherwise. The State of the Nation is a typically mismanaged one and could easily be mistaken for a third world country in the midst of a drastic humanitarian crisis: “A round up of water supply conditions nationwide” leads the Irish Times; ‘Burst Pipes Brings New Year Misery For Thousands’ intones no more cheerily the Galway Advertiser.
Seeing as America doesn't take kindly to extended Irish imports and I have a degree to finish that's not one of the options, so instead I said I'd divulge to
Whatever decision High Court Justice Michael Peart comes to in a few weeks’ time, the Ian Bailey extradition trial will be a landmark moment in Irish and European legal history.
Ian Bailey, a former journalist with several British publications, is on trial before the High Court in Dublin on foot of a European Arrest Warrant seeking his extradition to France, where Judge Patrick Gachon, a well-connected magistrate, has endorsed a warrant seeking his extradition and trial in France to face trial for the alleged murder of a French film-maker, Sophie Toscan du Plantier, in a rural Irish summer village over 14 years ago.
The case presents many complex legal problems, but the largest by far is that Ireland’s own public prosecutor, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), decided in its investigations after the crime that Bailey wasn’t worth prosecuting through the Irish courts, and following three arrests and interrogation by Irish police, Bailey was released on each occasion without charge.
Former Ambassador James C. Kenny is a clever man indeed.
The former Kenny Management Services President and US Ambassador to Ireland was also a man who seems to have had a clearer idea of where Ireland was headed than the Government did itself.
In a series of insightful documents released by now infamous whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Kenny is seen counselling a doleful Irish government on the quandary facing the country in just a few short years from when the documents were dated (2004): a shortfalll of smart economy ready graduates from the nation’s universities, and a resulting exodus of foreign direct investment (FDI) from the now not so shimmery ‘Emerald’ Isle.
