Una Mullally

Una Mullally: Why does it take Kellie Harrington and Troy Parrott to say children need places to play? State has money for American football and Ryder Cup, but little to provide youngsters with amenities

Una Mullally: Why does it take Kellie Harrington and Troy Parrott to say children need places to play?

Tried to offer some context as to why people were protesting an injunction over alleged noise, taken by the new Hoxton hotel in Dublin City against a neighbouring long-established club and restaurant.

U2 Days of Ash review: You may loathe the politically broad tone, but the band sounds reinvigorated There is a strain of energy throughout this work that has an almost surprising urgency. It doesn’t all work, but there is power and tenderness

Wrote about U2's surprise new EP, Days of Ash.

Why did it take 13 months to identify man found dead in Phoenix Park? Podcast Episode · In The News · 17/02/2026 · 20m

Spoke about the story of Jim O’Neill on the Irish Times In The News podcast.

The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-lo...

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics.
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www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

Excellent 🧵

“[The FAI] could show a real bit of balls and refuse to play Israel. They should stand up in my view for the Palestinian state, the Palestinian people and the Palestinian football organisation.” - Brian Kerr, former Republic of Ireland manager

UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws

Peaceful protests and speech shut down, more than 2,700 arrested, young people on hunger strike, people imprisoned, pensioners dragged away on the streets, and after all that, the UK’s ban on Palestine Action is ruled unlawful.

Sliver Salon: Sarah Schulman, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity - Smock Alley Theatre 1662 Dublin’s independent queer press, Sliver, is thrilled to welcome Sarah Schulman to Dublin for an evening discussing her latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.

Thrilled to be bringing the brilliant Sarah Schulman to Dublin for Sliver Salon at Smock Alley Theatre, April 9th.

Supported by Dublin Municipal Theatre, in collaboration with Peninsula Press, Outburst Arts, EAF, Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive, and London Review of Books.

Get your tickets:

McSweeney goes - but ​​Josh Simons in the frame over targeting journalists Cabinet Office minister hired a PR firm to investigate journalists. His explanation is bewildering - and begs one big question. How can Starmer keep him on?

When he ran Labour Together, Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons hired a PR firm to investigate journalists

After our revelations, and a flurry of news stories, Simons finally gave his side of the story

But it doesn't seem to tally with the facts... 🧵

democracyforsale.substack.com/p/mcsweeney-...

‘Absolute hell’: Irish man with valid US work permit held by Ice since September Seamus Culleton has been in a detention facility in Texas for nearly five months despite having no criminal record

‘Absolute hell’: Irish man with valid US work permit held by Ice since September

Una Mullally: Evictions have now reached a similar level to the 1850s Child homelessness is the most devastating aspect of this crisis

Wrote about how more families present to emergency accommodation in the Dublin region due to notices of termination over any other single reason for their homelessness.

Evictions are the issue, and building public housing at scale is the solution.

Retirement Plan Academy-Award Nominated short film telling the story of Ray (Domhnall Gleeson) as he fantasises about everything he’d love to do in retirement, once he finally has the “time“. Watch Retirement Plan on...

If you're in Ireland, you can watch the Irish Oscar-nominated short film Retirement Plan on the RTÉ Player.

Directed by John Kelly, written by Kelly and Tara Lawall.

It probably would make it more explicit, but I don't know if it would change anything in practical terms. I think the popular desire for it is a signal that people want anything and everything done to address the crisis.

It could provide a constitutional counterbalance RE: private property rights. Whether that would increase supply is another matter.

Appetite for radical change grows as voters’ patience wears thin over housing crisis Half of all voters say country’s problems are getting worse instead of better

New polling on Ireland's housing crisis:

- 81% want the government to build more social housing "even if there are local objections"

- 64% disagree government is making progress on housing

- 67% would vote for a constitutional right to housing

- 29% are personally affected by the housing crisis

BREAKING: McSweeney’s think tank paid PR firm to investigate journalists Labour Together put private investigators onto journalists writing about its funding. Starmer's right-hand man knew.

🔴 BREAKING: Labour Together paid controversial PR firm £30k to investigate journalists who were digging into how its undeclared funding

Reporters from Sunday Times, Guardian and other outlets targetted

*And* Morgan McSweeney knew about it

Full story:
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

Highly recommend this exhibition, As If, at the International Centre for the Image in Dublin, by Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney and David Donohue.

Runs until April 5th.

Revealed: private jet owned by Trump friend used by ICE to deport Palestinians to West Bank Exclusive: Luxury aircraft owned by property tycoon close to US president’s family has twice flown Palestinian men from Arizona to Tel Aviv

According to this Guardian investigation, this jet refuelled at Shannon Airport on January 21st and February 1st.

'We're seeing eviction rates not seen in Ireland since the 1850s' The issuing of 5,000 eviction notices in three months last year is quite revealing when viewed against Ireland's historical record

"We are now seeing eviction rates that have not been seen in Ireland since the 1850s."

A damning reality laid bare in this piece of well-researched analysis.

I'm totally pinching myself announcing this, but a film about my life journey rewilding a West Cork farm, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, will get its first screening at the Dublin International Film Festival on Saturday the 28th of this month.

Tickets are available here:
www.diff.ie/programme/an...

Yep, agree with you RE: where the revenue actually goes. But also the discrepancy in spending when it comes to an NFL tourist event V local sporting events, and investment in grassroots amenities more generally. D8 and D1 in particular are so lacking in basic pitches, for example.

Una Mullally: If Dublin can pull out all the stops for the NFL, why not for the GAA? Now that we’ve seen what can be done to welcome an American football event to town, let’s do it for homegrown sports

Agree! Wrote about that last year:

Fintan O'Toole: Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson will go down in history as crawlers and creeps If we want to understand why democracy is in such trouble, we can learn plenty from the careers of two men who were once stellar figures in democratic politics

Blair and Mandelson will go down in history as crawlers and creeps.

“And for what? To be remembered as grasping minions of autocrats and abusers?”

Oh well!

To host the last game, the Irish gov spent €4.2m on a licence fee to the NFL, and another €5m on infrastructure and “operational costs”.

DCC spent €350,000.

Imagine if that money was spent on local sporting initiatives? A lot of kids in Dublin City don’t even have a pitch to play on.

The battle for Minneapolis: ‘Ice agents are like this invisible goon squad’ Two civilians have been shot dead but ordinary Americans - many from the very demographic that Trumpian’s ideology purports to uplift - continue to oppose the forces sent into their city by the presid...

Good piece by Keith Duggan in Minneapolis.

There might be good reasons for Britain to build data centres. Job creation isn’t one of them Estimate*estimate

Good piece on the generally very ropey “job creation” figures when it comes to data centres.

Mubi Acquires Oscar-Shortlisted Documentary ‘My Undesirable Friends’ And Upcoming Sequel Russia-themed documentary 'My Undesirable Friends' and its upcoming sequel, both directed by Julia Loktev, have been acquired by Mubi.

MUBI has acquired My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, and the upcoming sequel My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile.

Part 1 was the best film I saw in 2025. It's almost five and a half hours long, but there's not a moment wasted. Highly recommend.

How Bad Are A.I. Delusions? We Asked People Treating Them.

The doctors and therapists treating people experiencing A.I. delusions and suffering from A.I. chatbot-induced psychosis.

Commission investigates Grok and X\'s recommender systems under the Digital Services Act The European Commission has launched a new formal investigation against X under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The European Commission has launched a new formal investigation against X under the Digital Services Act, to "assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok's functionalities into X in the EU."