Declan Gaffney

Dublin’s €10 billion MetroLink to face legal challenge from group of 20 Ranelagh residents Judicial review could delay planned 18.8km line running from Swords to Dublin Airport and through city centre

Supporters of Ireland's planning system say it is wonderfully democratic. But here is a major project supported by repeated democratically-elected governments and put through a rigorous planning process (including plenty of public input) being stopped by 20 people. That's not democracy. It's chaos.

Exactly. Amazing they kept the quality so high for four series.

These are not contradictory positions!

NOS plaatst vanaf vandaag geen nieuwsberichten meer op X - Over NOS De NOS en Nieuwsuur (NOS/NTR) zijn gestopt met posten op X. Het platform past niet meer bij onze visie op...

A small but significant step: Dutch national broadcaster NOS is leaving X.

“The volume of hateful comments and disinformation on X is enormous and flows freely. This also applies under our own posts, meaning we unintentionally contribute to their spread”

over.nos.nl/nieuws/nos-p...

The Wire.

Don’t want to be too moralistic about this, but it is an active disgrace what people are doing to a profoundly liberational scheme that costs relatively piddling amounts on the basis of a couple of right wing shitposters misrepresenting it on Twitter.

RF are pro MW, but we agree it's 2nd order to benefits in tackling poverty. Big fight with Osborne over that re tax credit cuts in 2015.

One example: a 2-earner 3-kid family on MW wld have been *worse* off in 2024 than 2014 despite real earnings up 27% www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications...

I remember it being called Kenney's, then changing hands and acquiring the 'd'.

Sometimes wonder if what the UK needs is a thinktank that doesn't do any new research, it just repeats obviously true statements that people try to ignore because they're inconvenient.

International students cross-subsidise home students. Your pension is paid for out of general taxation.

This is so odd, because he's not saying he's the most corrupt, just that he's the most open about it, and surely that's not even debatable?

Wrote my undergrad dissertation there.

I have on occasion had to explain to Labour politicians that if a child is in poverty, their parents are in poverty as well.

I mean the government that introduced tax credits was the one that introduced the minimum wage. And this made perfect sense!

Much to agree with here, notably on Labour's bewildering lack of interest in what 2010-24 governments actually did in policy terms. But this - something we have known for well over a century! - just cannot be repeated too often.

Where is that? Can't make it out.

Teddy Wilson, Jazz Pianist, #BornOnThisDay in 1912, in Austin, Texas

(cc @glennkenny.bsky.social)

‘Prisoner of Love’: youtu.be/yJb-03xp2ZU?...

Has no one in the BBC heard of the Streisand effect?

Did everyone think, "oh, Rutger Bregman, he'll be cool with this"?

UK now at the point where the former Chair of the Racial Equalities Commission is calling for campaigns of terror against people of colour on the streets of the UK

Imagine praising "Latino parents are now so afraid to be seen out and about that they have a rota to walk the Latino children" and not wondering where your humanity went?

Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81 Star of The Harder They Come had hits including You Can Get It If You Really Want and I Can See Clearly Now

Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81

In the 15 years Labour have entertained Glasman, I cannot think of one single occasion where he has publicly criticised attacks on working class people, shown working class people solidarity, supported a single working class struggle.

He has enjoyed being a Lord though.

Lord Glasman is the founder of Blue Labour, the unapologetically pro-working class, culturally conservative campaign group. Its patron saint is Ernest Bevin, the trade unionist and wartime minister. "We always ask when we meet with the MPs, What would Ernest do? What would Ernest say?"

Fairly sure Bevin would tell him to fuck off.

Good lord. And Astral Weeks to boot.

what a surprise, majority of fash "Ireland is full" posts on shitter are from outside Ireland

Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Actors A new feature on Elon Musk’s X has given deeper insight into the online “America First” movement.

It’s hilarious and revelatory that a bunch of giant MAGA/America First X accounts are actually based in Eastern Europe and Nigeria.

Scrapping the two-child limit *is* welfare reform. Defining ‘reform’ solely as ‘cut’ is one reason why it’s proved so difficult

The fact that in both 2019 and 2024, the winning party did so with a set of manifesto promises that could not be kept and dissolved upon contact with actual office is something that as an industry we should be much more bothered by than we are.

I missed this, from a year ago, but the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) uses not just clear Nazi aesthetics in its propaganda but also a clear Nazi salute.

By the way, these are the German friends of Trump and the GOP.

Update. Having rolled out feature that showed where everyone was living... thus exposing all those "patriot" accounts as foreign peddlers of disinformation... Musk thought better of it and removed it

'Was it for this?' but non-ironically.