Ciarán Casey

Another FIFA peace prize beckons

Looking forward to the blockades outside the house www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

That the Orange Order still wants to march down the Garvaghy road speaks volumes.

Ironically they don't get much media attention precisely because they work so well.

Last week we'd a seminar from Paul De Grauwe. I found him invaluable when thinking about the euro for my Department of Finance book. He anticipated the risks better than anyone, warning about potential housing booms and banking crises in 1998. A colleague rightly described his seminar as masterful

That sinking feeling as you open a set of reports and realise every one of them was AI generated. It's so weird that we've all continued with business as usual.

I'm only properly appreciating the magic of antibiotics

From @jburnmurdoch.ft.com back in July. Housing is a problem in a lot of places but here it's exceptionally bad.

There are queues at the car washes. There's a logic to letting businesses use water but the upshot is the restrictions don't bite if you can pay someone else to do it

Tonight, a new investigation reveals how much water each individual data centre campus has used in the past two years. But our findings also show how pharma plants have used more than double that of data centres. Story w/ @davidmacredmond.bsky.social Read just after midnight on thejournal.ie 🔜

The Commission on Emigration (1954) bemoaning the lot of young Irish adults.

From the Commission on Emigration (1954). It should be the county motto tbh

So much of the dicussion on mid-century Irish health metrics focuses on policy debates and the church. Any comparative analysis suggests it was almost all about medicine

Ireland, 1954. Plus ça change

In the late 1940s the Department of Health was proudly giving out free DDT as a health measure

From the late 1940s

The first appearance of this font which I feel they used for the next fifty years

Deep in a statistical abstract from 1948. I'm actually amazed only 1% of @rte.ie broadcasting time was religious services

An impressive breakout from Dundrum mental aylum in 1926

Good news from England where authorities have finally seen sense and ended the pointless culling of badgers. In Ireland on it goes, killing thousands of badgers and costing taxpayers a ball breaking €157 million thus year alone. www.bbc.com/news/article...

This comes back to me every time I see the book now

I'm writing a book on material wellbeing since independence and quite chuffed with these two epigraphs from Cumann na nGaedheal for the opening chapter

Spot on by John Fitzgerald. There's a lot of political cowardice around pretending that the protestors were representative or particularly vulnerable www.irishtimes.com/business/eco...

Still haven't seen a census form that was read properly before they filled it out

We're like that cartoon of the dinosaurs watching the meteor coming www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/0...

Spring

I'm rereading a book by a Nobel-winning economist after 20 years. I was impressed the first time, whereas this time round I can't get over how he says absolutely nothing in as many words as possible With many 'classics' of fact and fiction most of their readers would struggle to summarise the point

We’re delighted to announce the society's 2026 Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Prof Tyler Anbinder of George Washington University. "The Surprising Socio-Economic Mobility of New York’s Great Famine Refugees" Online, 4pm GMT (11am EST), Thurs. 5 Mar. 2026. Register here: www.eshsi.org

Whoever picks the Valentine's movies for TV is really going left field. So far it's been romantic classics including The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, Rocky V and The Killing Fields

I'm writing a book on wellbeing in Ireland. What's striking about the GDP debate is policymakers here rarely treated it as the core metric, which was clearly employment. Similarly Simon Kuznets argued it was a rubbish measure of wellbeing right from its inception www.irishtimes.com/opinion/edit...

It's baffling that people still happily broadcast how many voluntary flights they're taking

I've always found this a really poor solution for a whole range of students

*Taps the sign*

If Bilbo had Chat GPT

Young people in the 1940s wasting their money instead of saving for a house

"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the US" True greatness

We're all like lobsters in a pot being slowly inured to how insane he is Trump vows higher tariffs on eight European countries until US gets Greenland – The Irish Times share.google/Pnkay4bJ4NAK...