An Epitaph Robert Stewart (“Castlereagh”), 1769-1822 A vulgar tool, an empty mask, a poison-blooded viper underfoot: the court and horde alike denied my lustre, drubbed my name. Though I cast the present century in vermillion, no record that I ever lived exists. Sedition wins by merely festering, a hidden epidemic no history can cure! Repressed … Read more
A Partial Epitaph My friend, with many an article and book saved in the Cloud, would censure Robert Emmet for attitudinising in the dock. We’re most of us the beneficiaries of ordered states; opinion-formers wanting Emmet stopped is something that one sees. But this rant? Picture him in middle age, pardoned, respectable, like Thomas Moore … Read more
Last November, in one of his final outings as Taoiseach, Micheál Martin delivered the annual Romanes Lecture at Oxford University. It’s unusual to find a senior Irish politician laying out a political philosophy, and for this he deserves credit, even if I take issue with his claim to occupying a ‘liberal’ middle ground. It reveals … Read more
