Ireland

Friday

Charles Moore

Euclid’s theorem of the Irish

The excellently named Euclid Tsakalotos has become the Greek finance minister after the sacking (tsaking?) of Varoufakis. He was educated at St Paul’s in the 1970s, and went on to Oxford. This atrocious suffering made him, even at the time, a supporter of Irish republicanism. In March this year, he popped up at a Sinn Fein conference and began his speech by apologising for his English accent, adding that ‘in mitigating circumstances, I am married to a Celt’. Euclid’s theorem is that the Irish are ‘honorary southerners’, now forming an arc of leftist insurrection which runs from Dublin, through Podemos in Spain, to Athens. Given the horrors inflicted on these

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 9 July 2015

The case for Daesh Sir: For once the admirable Rod Liddle has got it completely wrong (‘You can’t take the Islam out of Islamic State’, 4 July). We absolutely shouldn’t call the homoerotic, narcissistic death cult ‘Islamic State’ — not because it offends ordinary Muslims, nor because it has nothing to do with Islam (it has everything to do with Islam) but because it legitimises and validates the preposterous project. The media has a responsibility not to run terrorist propaganda unchallenged. Politicians, including the Prime Minister, are starting to wise up to this and should be applauded for doing so. We are in an information war with our enemies. Let

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 25 June 2015

Free trade with Africa Sir: Nicholas Farrell suggests that a naval blockade is the only solution to Italy’s immigration crisis (‘The invasion of Italy’, 20 June). Examining the causes of the situation might identify other measures. Since the European Union effectively closed its borders to trade with Africa to protect European farmers from lower food prices, the agricultural economies of most African countries have been in decline. Of course there is another reason for Africa’s decline. About 60 years ago, the Europeans found it convenient to convince themselves that in Africa self-government was better than good government. It followed that aid would be a convenient substitute for the risks or

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Irish Catholicism’s response to gay marriage hasn’t been totally incoherent

Matthew Parris, in a characteristically elegant essay in this week’s magazine, complains about the rubbish quality of the arguments against gay marriage in the wake of the Irish Referendum; so very different from the kind of intellectually coherent Christian discourse that we used to get from the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge, C.S. Lewis et al. He’s got a point, though he is being a little unfair in identifying as the personification of intellectual shallowness Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin. His remarks on RTE, Irish television, after the referendum did not, admittedly, show him in a particularly good light. When he said that the church in Ireland needed to undertake

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is gay marriage just a fad?

Now that Ireland has voted Yes to same-sex marriage, it will be widely believed that this trend is unstoppable and those who oppose it will end up looking like people who supported the slave trade. It is possible. But in fact history has many examples of admired ideas which look like the future for a bit and then run out of steam — high-rise housing, nationalisation, asbestos, Esperanto, communism. The obsession with gay rights and identity, and especially with homosexual marriage, seems to be characteristic of societies with low birth rates and declining global importance. Rising societies with growing populations see marriage as the key to the future of humanity, so

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 May 2015

Amnesty International and others have placed a large newspaper advertisement telling Michael Gove ‘Don’t Scrap Our Human Rights’. The ad asserts that ‘A government cannot give human rights or take them away’, which, if true, makes one wonder how it can scrap them. Human rights are philosophically a confused idea; but their political power consists in the fact that anyone questioning them can be made to look nasty. People who love making new laws — particularly new laws that cost money — therefore like to present these laws as human rights. Article 29 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, for example, says ‘Everyone has the right of access to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 May 2015

Home A Bill to enable a referendum on whether voters wanted Britain to ‘remain’ in the European Union figured in the Queen’s Speech. Another Bill prohibited any rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020. Tenants of housing associations would be given the right to buy their homes. Provision for Scottish devolution was promised in fulfilment of the recommendations of the cross-party Smith Commission. A ‘powerhouse’ in the north was to come into being through cities being given powers over housing, transport, planning and policing. Laws on strikes would be tightened. Red tape for business would be reduced, and a new quango set up to invigilate late

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

As a gay atheist, I want to see the church oppose same-sex marriage

I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature. Moses had come down from Mount Sinai bringing God’s commandments written on two tablets of stone. ‘And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot…

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Gay marriage will split the Catholic Church

Ireland, for so long the most overtly Catholic state in Western Europe, has voted for gay marriage by a stupendous margin – 62 per cent. Never before has a country legalised the practice by popular vote. It would be naive to ask: how could this happen? Hatred of the Church is one of the central features of modern Ireland, thanks not only to the paedophile scandals but also to the joyless quasi-Jansenist character of the Irish Church, which was handed complete control of education in the Free State after partition in 1922. (Many of its priests were outstandingly holy and charitable, but you’ll get your head bitten off if you suggest that in today’s

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Ireland’s gay marriage vote was never an equal contest

In more ways than one it’s impossible to be heard above the din right now in the wake of the Yes vote in Ireland on gay marriage. There’s a special noise that goes with an orgy of self-congratulation, a roar of mutual approbation, and it drowned everything else out in Dublin as the results came in today. Like rugby, only more triumphalist. Actually, I was watching the scene from the Sky studio in Millbank, where my interlocutor in central Dublin, Patrick Strudwick, a journalist and activist, was appearing on a screen on the streets and had to shout over the crowd to make himself heard, to repeat, over and over

Wednesday

Ed West

The free market is still the greatest force for reducing prejudice

I suppose if you’d told someone in Northern Ireland 25 years ago that the most contentious issue come May 2015 would be a gay cake they would have taken that future. If you’d gone back another 300 years and told John Locke he might not be so pleased, however, to find that his principle of conscience had been so abused by the people who claimed to follow his philosophy. The Ashers refused to bake a cake that proclaimed a message in support of same-sex marriage, which they do not support, and therefore have been found to have discriminated. Yet no one would object to a baker who refused to bake a

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The ‘gay cake’ case highlights a new intolerance developing in Ireland

In what sense, precisely, has a bakery in County Antrim contravened discrimination law by refusing to ice a cake with a gay marriage slogan on it? The ‘gay cake’ case does have the useful function of identifying the partisan and idiot character of the Equality Commission, in this case, of Northern Ireland, which acted for gay rights activist Gareth Lee, the offended customer, whose slogan was repudiated by Ashers Bakery. The cake itself is silent on the matter right now but it was, I gather, available to be consumed by any customer of Ashers Bakery, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation. And that’s just the point. Ashers, which is run

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

Ireland’s ‘tolerant’ elite now demonise anyone who opposes gay marriage

If you think it’s tough being a Tory voter in 21st-century Britain, try being a ‘No’ voter in this week’s Irish referendum on gay marriage. Sure, Twitterati sneering at all things right-wing might have turned some Conservatives into Shy Tories, hiding their political leanings from pollsters. But in Ireland, to be a naysayer in relation to gay marriage is basically to make yourself a moral leper, unfit for polite society, ripe for exclusion from respectable circles. Irish opponents of gay marriage aren’t only encouraged to feel shy — they’re encouraged to feel shame. On Friday, the Irish electorate will be asked to vote on the redefinition of marriage as a

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

All the pomp of family life

The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking distance from an unnamed town on the coastline of County Clare, is home to the Madigan family. At the centre of the family is Rosaleen Madigan, the matriarch: ‘A woman who did nothing and expected everything. She sat in this house, year after year, and she expected.’ The novel begins with the thwarting of one of Rosaleen’s expectations. She has taken to her bed in 1980 after Dan, the eldest of her four children, has announced that he is going to become a priest. Each of the first four chapters

Wednesday

Christopher Snowdon

I don’t trust these latest obesity predictions from the nanny state

Seventy-four per cent of men and 64 per cent of women in Britain will be overweight or obese by 2030, or so the newspapers have reported today. In Ireland, the situation will be still worse, with the obesity rate amongst women predicted to rise from 23 per cent today to 57 per cent (!) in 2030, with 89 per cent of Irish men overweight. The research in question was presented at a conference in Prague today but remains unpublished so we do not know how its authors arrived at these figures. A representative of the World Health Organisation says, ‘the data needs to be taken with extreme caution’, but this advice

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Cheap shots and uncosted bribes are drowning out vision, wisdom and optimism

The interesting thing about Labour’s pledge to abolish non-dom tax status — a squib designed to trap Tories into expressing sympathy for the rich, in the knowledge on the part of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls that it might cause loss of tax revenues and inward investment — is that it has been welcomed by influential voices in the City. The Eds must be astonished to find Sir Roger Carr, chairman of BAE Systems and former deputy chairman of the Bank of England, bang on message: he told the FT that non-dom rules are ‘a relic of the past that unfairly favours the few at the expense of the many’.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Bet on a swift Grexit

‘Will Greece exit the eurozone in 2015?’ Paddy Power was pricing ‘yes’ at 3-to-1 on Tuesday, with 5-to-2 on another Greek general election within the year and 6-to-4 on the more cautious ‘Greece to adopt an official currency other than the euro by the end of 2017.’ I’m no betting man — as I reminded myself after backing a parade of point-to-point losers on Sunday — and I defer to our in-house speculator Freddy Gray, who will offer a wider guide to political bets worth having in the forthcoming Spectator Money (7 March). But on the Greek card I’m tempted by the longer odds on the shorter timeframe, because this

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A tatty new theatre offers up a comic gem that’s sure to be snapped up by the BBC

New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The below-stairs space wears the heavy oaken lineaments of Victorian piety but the flagstones have been smothered with prim suburban carpeting, wall-to-wall. There’s a bar in one corner. Yes, a bar in a church. With prices high enough to make you take the pledge. The ecclesiastical shelves are crammed with books, magazines, scripts and photographs that summon up the ghosts of our comedy heroes. A big carved pew, centrally plonked, invites the worshipper to sit and read, let us say, the autobiography of Clive Dunn or the diaries of Kenneth Williams.

Wednesday

Mary Dejevsky

Want to understand the conflict in Ukraine? Compare it to Ireland

What seemed this time last year to be a little local difficulty in Ukraine has metastasised to the point where a peace plan drafted in Paris and Berlin may be all that stands in the way of war between the West and Russia. Over the months, many of those watching, appalled, from the safety of the side-lines, have combed history for precedents and parallels that might aid understanding or offer clues as to what might be done. Last spring, after Russia snatched Crimea and appeared ready to grab a chunk of eastern Ukraine too, the favoured comparisons were with Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of Sudetenland. It was a parallel that

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

The pope is right – smacking your kids is sometimes OK

One good thing has come out of the fuss over the pope’s comments about it being ok to smack your children (so long as their dignity is maintained); it has flushed out the former Irish president, Mary McAleese, as tiresomely conventional in much the same way as her predecessor, Mary Robinson – the very incarnation of PC. Shame, because I’d been a fan until I read her letter to the Irish Times on Saturday criticising the pope for his remarks, on the basis that they’re at odds with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which, apparently, has zero tolerance when it comes to corporal punishment. Actually, make that two benefits to