Sinn Féin versus William the Conqueror

Pat Leahy and Harry McGee join Hugh Linehan to look back on the week in politics:
Ireland's decision to participate in a
European-wide initiative celebrating Norman heritage
and influence has drawn the ire of Sinn Féin. The initiative is called '2027 The Year of the Normans – People of Europe', and Cabinet approved plans to mark 1000 years since the birth of England's first Norman king William the Conqueror have been
labelled 'offensive' by the Opposition party.
In a move to start the flow of
humanitarian aid into Gaza
after Israel's near three-month blockade,
a majority of EU states
have backed a proposal to review the union's agreement governing relations with Israel.
The HSE estimates that the number of children on
waiting lists for disability or autism services
will grow from 15,000 now to 25,000 by the end of the year, something
disability rights campaigner Cara Darmody
(14) highlighted with a 50-hour protest outside Leinster House this week.
Independent Ireland TD Kenneth O'Flynn had a wish list comprising 10 separate items for his parliamentary office at Leinster House, including
a 'La-Z-Boy' recliner
for 'breaks and informal meetings.'
And the
skorts controversy
looks to have reached its conclusion after delegates at the Camogie Association Special Congress passed a motion to allow players to wear shorts by 98 per cent.
Plus, the panel picks their favourite Irish Times pieces of the week:
Joe Biden
's cognitive and physical decline,
hurling
at its most biblical, and the
four distinct categories
that leaders fall into.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Irish Independent

2 hours ago

• Irish Independent

Irish language signs ‘must be a part of our future' in Northern Ireland, says Michelle O'Neill

The First Minister was speaking at Sinn Fein's annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration at Bodenstown, Co Kildare, on Sunday. Sinn Fein's Stormont leader also said work on Casement Park in west Belfast must begin 'now', despite a funding shortfall in the tens of millions remaining. There has also been much recent controversy over plans to install signage in Irish in Belfast's new transport hub, with unionists heavily opposed to the idea. Ms O'Neill told republicans gathered at the final resting place of Tone, 'the father of Irish republicanism', that she was 'honoured to serve as First Minister for all, committed to power-sharing and to progress, and committed to representing all equally'. 'Acht na Gaeilge is now a reality and in the coming months the Irish Language Commissioner will be appointed,' she said. 'And in a fair and balanced way Irish language signs such as those in Grand Central Station must be part of our future. 'Additional funding was secured for Casement Park which creates renewed momentum. The work must now begin. This is a vital project not just for west Belfast, not just for the GAA, but for sports more widely in the north and across the island. 'A top class sporting stadium is a win for all. Sinn Féin is committed to investing in all sporting codes. Casement Park will be built.' Ms O'Neill also said it was time to extend voting rights in Irish presidential elections to Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. The Assembly recently passed a Sinn Féin non-binding motion to do so, although the Aontú party in the Republic had already submitted a private member's bill on the same matter in Dublin. Ms O'Neill said the vote in Stormont to extend the vote north of the border was 'something unthinkable only a short number of years ago'. 'But it is a sign of confidence in our future. A sign of things changing for the better,' she said. 'A similar motion will be debated in the Dáil this coming week. 'It is a decade since a bill was first passed in the Dáil, but it has been blocked by successive governments. 'Now is the time to act. Now is the time to extend voting rights to Irish citizens in the north.' Ms O'Neill also condemned recent racially-motivated rioting in Ballymena, Portadown and elsewhere as 'raw, unadulterated racism, fuelled by sectarian, supremacist loyalism, involving, in many cases, paramilitary elements, much of which was mirroring ultra-right English nationalism'. She also described the Northern Ireland government's Legacy Act as 'fundamentally flawed and it is a cynical piece of legislation' and called for an immediate public inquiry into the murder of GAA official Sean Brown, who was murdered by loyalists in 1997.

Irish Times

3 hours ago

• Irish Times

Dublin Airport will eventually exceed 40 million passengers a year, Minister for Transport predicts

Imposing annual passenger caps on Dublin Airport will be 'arbitrary' as even the 40 million cap being sought by airport operator DAA will be surpassed within a short period, Minister for Transport Darragh O'Brien says. The cap of 32 million passengers a year, which has been in place since 2008, was breached in 2023 and 2024. Mr O'Brien said the number of passengers passing through the airport was likely to exceed 36 million this year. He said it was a clear aim in the Programme for Government to end the restriction on passenger numbers. READ MORE 'I want to see the cap in Dublin Airport removed. I think any artificial stifling of growth within Dublin Airport, it would be counterproductive for the country,' he said. Last week, Fingal County Council, which is the local authority with responsibility for the airport, issued an enforcement notice that gave DAA a two-year period to comply with the planning conditions imposed by An Bord Pleanála in 2008. However, there is a High Court-imposed stay pending the outcome of proceedings taking by a number of airlines against the cap. Mr O'Brien said that stay was likely to remain until the second half of next year. He said the Government was now working on a new National Aviation Policy to address the issues of the volume of traffic around the State's main airport hub. He said a key ruling by An Bord Pleanála on night flights at the airport – expected within weeks – would be critical. At present no flights are allowed to take off from or land on the north runway between 11pm and 7am. The night-time movements of aircraft in the airport are restricted to 65 overall. DAA has applied for those restrictions to be eased and there is expectation that aircraft will be allowed on the north runway between 6am and midnight daily. This change has been strongly opposed by residents living in St Margaret's and The Ward, two communities located at the perimeter of the airport. Mr O'Brien, a TD for the constituency, said he was very conscious of the concerns of those communities and the challenges they faced. 'I've been at pains to say to DAA to operate under the good neighbour principle,' he said. He said some people in the St Margaret's area were in effect living right beside the runway. He said the airport should improve its voluntary purchase package as the impact was significant on a small number of households. 'They can't be forgotten,' he said. However, Mr O'Brien said the airport needed to expand and that included passenger numbers. He said if decision on night flights was in favour of expanding the hours then that would help passenger numbers grow. 'A total of 3 per cent of GDP comes from activity around the airport campus. It's a critical driver for economic growth, and supports about 20,000 jobs directly and about 130,000 indirect jobs.' He said basing numbers on forward projections over 10 years the number of passengers would exceed 40 million each year before then. 'One should ask the question, if DAA applies for a passenger cap of 40 million how long will that last? Is that cap going to be [surpassed]? Therefore should you have an arbitrary cap?' Mr O'Brien also said he had consulted Attorney General Rossa Fanning and may bring forward legislation to prevent what he sees as overly restrictive limits. He said the cap was put in 2008 as a response to inadequate transport infrastructure at the airport. He said the situation had changed since then, with a change in terms of roads, public transport and access.

Irish Times

3 hours ago

• Irish Times

We like to romanticise Ireland's past, but too much remembering could be bad for us

There is no comparison between the Provisional IRA and the Irish Volunteers who staged the Easter Rising in 1916. Patrick Pearse's generation of republicans never set off bombs in crowded pubs or on shopping streets , indiscriminately murdering civilians. They never pulled people out of vehicles and shot them dead because they were Protestants . But there is one parallel that Gerry Adams was able to point to at his successful defamation case against the BBC : the Rising had no democratic legitimacy. When the issue of the Provisional movement's lack of electoral mandate for 'atrocities' was mentioned in court, Adams replied : 'Pádraig Pearse. James Connolly. The men and women who went out in 1916, they had no mandate for what they were doing.' Adams has a point, but it doesn't reflect well on the IRA of which he has always denied being a part. It reflects poorly on an ill-thought-out insurrection that the State now publicly reveres above any other episode in Ireland's journey to independence. Twenty years ago, then-taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced the reinstatement of an Easter Monday military parade at the General Post Office in Dublin. He said there was a need to 'reclaim' 1916 from hardline nationalists. But two decades on, has the move backfired? READ MORE Fr Séamus Murphy, who teaches philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, believes so. 'I don't demand that the State disown the men of 1916. But it has to stop praising them and calling their action the foundation of the State,' Murphy says. The Jesuit priest explores the question further in a new book Confronting the Irish Past: The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It is an unusual work in that it tries to bring philosophical insights to bear on Irish history. Murphy, who has written extensively on just war theory and Irish neutrality, asks some deep questions about the ethics of commemoration: What duties do we have to our ancestors? How much commemoration is too much? Is there a hierarchy of 'emotional hurt' from historical events? Murphy examines the work of the German Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt , who believed history 'needed not so much to be explained as to be confronted'. This meant, among other things, acknowledging the 'ongoing impact' of events – and how political violence leaves a scar on society that can be unpicked in the future. Too much remembering can have negative effects on a population. In Northern Ireland , people were horrified at the recent clashes with police officers during street protests. But the thuggery was not entirely surprising in a province where two communities have been glorifying acts of violence for decades. Elsewhere in the world, commemoration of historical victimhood can be weaponised to commit crimes against humanity. 'It's a human thing. We remember our people's sufferings, while being indifferent to those of others, including the sufferings our tribe or nation inflict on the others. In the latter case, we can be inclined to say: they had it coming, they deserved it,' says Murphy. Ultimately, the question arises: who is history meant to serve – the living or the dead? 'It is bad for us to behave in the present as if our ancestors, dead grandparents, etc, no longer mattered in any sense. It would be treating them with contempt. Same goes for how we behave in the present with respect to how it would likely affect future generations,' says Murphy. But we should not be afraid to adapt history 'for the needs of the living'. That includes foregrounding the celebration of those events that pave the way for the future we wish to see. 'The nationalist side – our people – has to acknowledge that, just as Sinn Féin /IRA's political enemy in Northern Ireland from the 1970s to today was the SDLP – or any other party with a significant nationalist following – so the political target of the 1916 Rising was not the British government or the Ulster unionists but the Home Rule party,' says Murphy. ' John Redmond and the Home Rule party were moving, slowly, to doing a Bertie Ahern and signing a Good Friday Agreement, recognising that unionists couldn't be compelled into a united Ireland. The Rising is the scream of rage against that. We can't – without engaging in massive pretence – claim to endorse the Rising and the Good Friday Agreement with no qualification: they contradict each other at several points.' Here lies a test for all of us. To create a shared future on this island, and internationally, we must move beyond uncritically celebrating the actions of any particular tribe. Standing in our way is an imagined moral duty to people who are long dead and who had their own flaws. Surely our overriding moral duty is for the living? [ How Tuam, synonymous with a dark side of Irish history, can finally 'do the right thing' Opens in new window ] WB Yeats 's line 'Was it for this ... that all that blood was shed?' has an emotional force in debates on Ireland's future. But, says Murphy, 'just as you shouldn't feel compelled by your dead parents' wish that you should become a neurosurgeon – or a priest – so a political agenda of a previous generation cannot compel today's political action. Your parents have no right to say – adapting Yeats – to you, if you choose to be a journalist rather than what they wanted: was it for this that we made all those sacrifices?'