The true value of John Waters

The Irish newspaper industry has realised there's easy money to be made from declaring war on its own online readership. By David Johnson.

Stop me if you've heard this one, "What's black and white and red all over?"

If you answered, "The Irish newspaper industry, which is only scarleh after yet another humiliating fiasco in which they displayed an appalling ignorance and lack of understanding over the basic concepts of the internet," then well done, gold star for you.

It's one law for them...

While some sectors of our society are allowed to break the law with impunity, others who act in an entirely lawful manner are harassed by the gardaí because their actions are a political irritant to the Government. By David Johnson.

Sinn Féin, expenses, and why the party has to do better than this

A lack of transparency around the policy of Sinn Féin TDs taking only the average industrial wage, and a succession of irregularities in the financial methodology used by both individual TDs and the party itself around expenses casts a cloud of uncertainty over the party's claims to represent a break with the traditionally corrupt practices of the oligarchs of our political kleptocracy. By David Johnson.

What about meeeeee?!

Possibly the best catchphrase in the world was recently taught to me by the 4-year-old son of a good friend, who upon seeing any of the grown-ups in the room talking amongst themselves would sidle up to one of them and with big anime doe eyes enquire, ‘What about meeeeeee?’ I know not whether this comes from an epilepsy-inducing cartoon, a tale of anthropomorphic trains or is the product of his own overachieving mind, but it lodged in my brain like a photo-op of a skipping Taoiseach gambolling across the street eager to have his head patted by any passing European technocrats.

Putting lipstick on a pig

The Irish citizenry remains silent as we are ritually humiliated and degraded. Ireland is a nation that can no longer meet its own gaze. By David Johnson.