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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The 'commemoration' began with a celebration of the 250 year anniversary of the black stuff's introduction to the world, but the drinks British makers, the international conglomerate Diageo, have decided, disingenuously, to continue it every year since.
One of the contributors likened the beginning of Arthur's Day to a documented phenomenon in psychology whereby if enough people do something, others inevitably follow.
And it's recent graduates who are anecdotally, and statistically, taking the brunt of it: statistics show that the majority of those seeking out are aged between 25 and 44, while the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) this afternoon issued a strongly worded press release stating that recent college graduates were increasingly left with no choice but to seek to earn a living in sunnier shores.
USI President Gary Redmond this afternoon said that the issue seemed, remarkably, to be off the government's radar, and said that it was almost too late to rectify the situation.
If one thing the recession doesn't seem to have brought much of to Ireland, paradoxically, it's lower prices.
That unfortunate reality was re-iterated again by the latest figures from Ireland's statistics agency the Central Statistics Office (CSO), which show that Ireland remains the fifth most expensive country in Europe, despite being in the throes of an economic bailout crisis, unemployment, etc.
Irish prices remain a sturdy 18% above the European average, the statistics found. Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg and Sweden are now the only countries in the Eurozone with a higher cost of living.
As a headline from Dublin's The Herald put it: "as everyone else drops prices, solicitors raise them".
Amazingly, as the column notes, this is despite the fact that the sector is almost as beset with economic woes as the rest of the economy, and many solicitors and barristers (Ireland maintains separate branches of the legal profession; in the US both are 'attorneys-at-law'), are out of work.
In its long-awaited response to Prime Minister Enda Kenny's firebrand speech in parliament this summer, the Vatican has called 'unfounded' the government's accusations that it attempted to frustrate enquiries into rampant sexual abuse in Ireland, while making a tepid acknowledgement that it 'shares' in and understands the widespread public anger ignited by the damning Cloyne Report.
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has quickly jumped on the PR bandwagon, calling on the Taoiseach to substantiate the allegations of frustrating the criminal process which he accused the powers-in-Rome of earlier this summer, but both Kenny and the government have refused to budge from their original positions.
It's not exactly the stuff of high diplomatic drama, but the weak response from the Vatican - the product of 'consultations' between recalled papal nuncio Giuseppe Leanza and the Holy See - will do little to improve the Vatican's badly damaged image in Ireland, and continues the lengthening cooling off between the two sovereign powers.
