Soapbox

Category: News

  • GE16 – The bigger picture.

    The votes are counted, the seats are filled. We still don’t have a government of course, thanks to the ongoing punch and judy show of coalition negotiations. Some immutable facts remain however, amidst the legislative hubbub:   Fine Gael are still the biggest party in Ireland, with 50 seats. Fianna Fail are the second biggest,…

  • Interview with Shane Daly

      With the Andy Lee world title defence on the horizon, but not bloody close enough. David O’Connor caught up with Shane Daly, (seen on the left of the photo) head trainer at St Saviour’s boxing club to pick his brain about all things boxing.   Right, let’s break you into it nice and gently,…

  • Well, it’s nonsense isn’t it?

    I suppose it was a slight folly becoming a sports contributor on a new website at the beginning of the summertime. The soap opera that is top flight European football and the bruising beauty of European rugby are in hiatus. I am not in the humour to discuss GAA as Limerick’s summer is over at…

  • Further Down the Rabbit Hole

    So I was wrong, Sepp has fallen and I suppose it makes sense that it would take a law enforcement agency, from a country that doesn’t like football all that much to bring down the governing body of the sport. This outsourcing is a theme that we should look into when the rebuilding or replacing of…

  • Populist politics – An age old legacy

    An article by Cliff Taylor in the The Irish times advocating a neutral budget for 2015 has caused … well, absolutely no reaction whatsoever, partly because he wrote the same article this time last year. It does however raise a few interesting points that bear consideration. He argued for what would be a classic case…

  • The Pen and The Sword

    I love and loathe the law in equal respect and often for the same reasons. More often than not, the judicial system is quite clear on the confines in which we as a society must act. Sometimes, and this is where the love/loathe relationship really comes into play, the law is a complicated mistress, where…

  • The Only Loser is Democracy

    It must be great to own the news. Not necessarily be the news, but own it. Own the channels of distribution that give the public their knowledge, and in doing so, be the de facto gate-keeper that decides what knowledge becomes public in the first place. Now, presumably you must have some serious amount of money and power to…

  • Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

    While I think that it is generally accepted that Michael Noonan is one of very few ministers to perform quite well in difficult circumstances over the lifetime of our current administration, the decision to appoint KPMG seems at the very least to violate the basic principle that ‘’Not only must Justice be done; it must…

  • Blatter Splatter

    So, cowardice and avarice win out again at another Fifa election. Sepp coasts over the line with support from his allies in the football power houses of Monserrat, Tonga and Papua New Guinea. How did Blatter manage to manage to get re-elected? He is a misogynistic, ego maniac who is completely out of touch with…

  • D’you who grinds my gears? You, No side.

    So, this is where we find ourselves, the only clear debate on the marriage referendum so far, took place on the Late Late show. Super. A saccharine chat show was the only debate that maintained a semblance of discipline. It was the utter antithesis to the cacophony of Dunphyesque screams on Primetime and the Vincent…