The start of the year saw this:

The IT business section, courtesy of Mark Paul and Conor Pope, wrote in early January before the unprecedented spike in numbers (though not before many had pointed to that spike likely to take place) that:

Representatives of the retail sector expressed "bewilderment" that non-essential stores are once again being forced to shut their doors despite an absence of evidence they are contributing in a significant way to the spread of coronavirus, as the Government moved the State to full Level 5 restrictions until February.

It was a year when an old and familiar figure in this slot left the battlefield.

Somehow this morning one of the most bleak issues of the day has one commentator roping in Sinn Féin, again.

The Commission on Mother and Baby Homes prophetically warned about its report: "The conclusions it reaches may not always accord with the prevailing narrative." Certainly it didn't accord with the "prevailing narrative" of RTÉ presenters and Mary Lou McDonald, determined to pin all blame on church and State and to let Irish society off the hook. As an atheist, I am normally slow to defend the Roman Catholic Church or the pieties of Official Ireland – such as its lip service to Irish unity.

Anne Harris in the IT provided a perfect sometime replacement for Stephen Collins as she chides 'us' for Anglophobia. Her evidence and conclusion?

Equally importantly the royal family is bound to our republic through terrible ties. But a perfect storm of Brexit, the decade of centenaries and Covid captivity before RTÉ screens, has fostered a kind of casual Anglophobia which has expunged appreciation of the ordinary humanity of royals, their foibles and failings…

From the SBP:

Danny McCoy of Ibec, the body which represents employers, is a man who chooses his words carefully. So when he labels the behaviour of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) on two major issues as "scandalous", it is worth noting.

 

Over the Summer someone had a very idiosyncratic definition of cronyism.

If the appointment of Katherine Zappone as a "special envoy for freedom of opinion and expression" was cronyism, it was pretty lousy cronyism. Zappone has never been a member of Fine Gael, is retired from Irish politics and has left the country; although she served in government with Simon Coveney, Leo Varadkar and Paschal Donohoe, it is unclear what kind of leverage she might have over them to insist on a sinecure.

The appointment has antagonised Coveney's actual cronies — Fine Gael. "Many Fine Gaelers feel one from their own ranks could have filled the job of special envoy," reported Senan Molony.

An intriguing framing in the following from June in amongst the rhetoric about 'nanny state':

 

With hospitalisations and ICU numbers at a fraction of where they were, the only conclusion that can be made is that this extension [of emergency powers due to the pandemic] has less to do with the public health emergency of last year and has much more to do with the nanny state writ large.

I am no conspiracy theorist and I do not write such a conclusion easily, but it is difficult to see it any other way

Two Finn McRedmonds? Sure. How else to explain the following:

Finn McRedmond writes about the latest outbreak of flag-waving by the British government and the destabilising aspect of that North of the Border here.

The present ubiquity of the Union Jack is an unsubtle attempt to assert Britain as the former. With the union in peril the government is crafting a vision of post-Brexit Britain that makes the British nation and its symbols as visible as possible. It may not be openly hostile to devolution, but it is indicative of a government uncomfortable with how far it has gone. And it speaks to a deep anxiety about growing fissures between Scotland and Westminster. Unfortunately flying the flag is a rather flimsy way to reclaim the robustness the union once boasted. It is the qualities of the cause, not pictures of the cause, that convince people. But more than that, this latest venture in flag waving is at odds with the political realities of Britain right now. Scotland is a fully realised nation on its own terms (for most swing voters the Union Jack has little emotional pull). And Northern Ireland relies on its hybrid sovereignty and smudged relationship with the Republic for its ongoing peace. Pursuing a vision of Britain that inflexibly asserts the dominance of the Union Jack rather than acknowledging these nuances begins to look counterproductive.

This is markedly different in tone from another Finn McRedmond writing in the IT some months back who said:

And we should resist the lazy impulse to refract these questions through the lens of British colonialism too: that Brexit is an imperial project; that the struggles Britain face are deserved thanks to historical indiscretions; that somehow whatever chaos ensues post-Brexit is merely karmic justice. Not least because we cannot in good faith kick Brexit as an English-nationalist project, while simultaneously leveraging our own nationalist arguments to justify delighting in this schadenfreude.

In the IT in February Newton Emerson believed that…

 

The principle of "both sides as bad as each other" – the weary resignation on which Northern Ireland rests – had been re-established. EU arrogance and British embarrassment were evened out. Irish Europhilia, mostly displaced Anglophobia, had met its Waterloo.

Any other favourite comments from the year?