If a PBP TD said that there were too many foxhunters in Ireland and then there was a arson attack on a hunting lodge that night, you can be damn sure that Simon Harris could join the dots.

He really should resign.

It's all just so frustrating and predictable, isn't it? For years people have been warning of the far right rising in Ireland and we've been laughed at and dismissed by the media and the government. In turn, the govt. have not acted, have treated right wing agitators with kid gloves.

I've resisted the term "Ulsterification" cos it implies that NI's political culture is somehow un-British, rather than an entirely British weaponisation of Britishness, enabled and enacted by British interests.

But the PSNI boomeranging back to London to round up protesters is really something.

Non-Irish people should be told that Ireland is creased with national hilarity because the Catholic conservative candidate who failed to get enough support did a presser to talk about how Ireland had been cheated out of having a real 'people's candidate' while holding a €20K+ Hermes handbag.

"We didn't come here to listen to a load of stuff about famine and colonialism and genocide and being forced into exile, we came to hear some Irish folk songs!"

Global average temperatures are spiking, rising faster than climate models seem able to explain, and in a sane world, every country would be united in a full-scale effort to figure this out & respond. Instead the US is dismantling its scientific infrastructure.

The purpose of a system is what it does