Sinéad Murphy Driving home after Christmas, we pulled in at the last toll plaza on the M8 to Cork. It had been dark for hours with ‘Storm Gerrit’ still pelting. As I lowered the window to hold out my card, a voice struck through the dark and wind and rain, screaming over the heavens and …
Sinéad Murphy On 6th November, Dublin launched its Autism Friendly City plan in a bid to become the world’s most autism friendly capital city. ‘It’s a really exciting day,’ Dublin’s Lord Mayor said. ‘I do hope where Dublin leads, the rest of the country can follow also because it’s so, so important that we are …
Sinéad Murphy Safe, Smart, Special – the three pillars of our doublespeak. ‘Safe’ endangers your life; ‘Smart’ degrades your faculties; ‘Special’ makes you normal. * ‘Safe’ would seem to mean the avoidance of harm. What it means now is the avoidance of possibility. To be safe is to be removed from the world so that …
Sinéad Murphy The University of Sunderland is advertising ‘masterclasses’ in ‘Menopause in the Workplace.’ The ad has been running on Smooth Radio, a station under the umbrella of Global – one of the alarmingly few corporate megaliths with increasing command over our airwaves, our money flows and our veins. The ad is voiced in an …
Sinead Murphy As 2020 dawned, two concepts came to loom on our horizon: ‘pandemic’ and ‘lockdown.’ Within a month or two, they had cast their pall over the whole of the human world. The concepts ‘pandemic’ and ‘lockdown’ share something quite fundamental. They each describe an absolute: a disease that affects all people everywhere and …
Sinead Murphy The showdown between Trudeau and the truckers has shown the real nature of a war that is by now quite obviously not about a virus. On 17th February, in an article at Brownstone Institute, David McGrogan described the Trudeau-trucker stand-off as not only ‘the single most significant event of the Covid pandemic’ but …
Sinead Murphy ‘Goodness’ is not the word I wanted to use in this article. But ‘ethics’ sounded too abstract, ‘morality’ too rule-bound, ‘virtue’ too archaic, and ‘kindness’ too corporate (at least since ‘random acts of kindness’). The ubiquity of that dreaded term ‘safety,’ brayed at us from every angle, has made all the old names …
Sinead Murphy In the midst of outrage at restrictions on our living arrangements, issued by a UK government that has lost its orientation to reality, two questions arise. The first continues to receive fulsome treatment, at least in non-mainstream media. It is: How can such restrictions be necessary? The second is less frequently addressed. It …
The global ‘lockdown’ has sought to defy our capacities for analysis, with its shock-and-awe impact on what has been our way of life. I begin, then, with a more banal scenario, which makes for rather dull reading, but from which it is possible to scale-up to an understanding of 'Covid19.'
