The Sunday Independent this morning has nothing but good news about how things are looking good for us on this island. But who could they be talking about here?

Constructive opposition is essential to a functioning, free society, but the toxic cynicism and pessimism for its own sake which is peddled routinely by certain politicians and commentators can only serve to demoralise a Covid-weary population. Ireland remains a stable, prosperous, reasonable country which is not at risk of plunging into extremism or chaos.

Speaking of sunny optimism... Dan O'Brien offers this in the Business Post today:

Much of the increased support for Sinn Féin reflects a desire for change, not any deep allegiance to the party itself. In other democracies, new leaders and new parties have emerged quickly and have managed to capture the public mood, and large numbers of votes in short time periods.

France's Emmanuel Macron and his En Marche movement come to mind owing to the speed and success with which they came from nowhere to win power. There is fertile ground in Ireland now for a charismatic and credible leader who could draw fresh faces into politics. Offering the prospect of change without the sort of democratic and economic risks Sinn Féin poses would be an appealing prospect for many voters in 2022 and beyond.

A 'charismatic and credible leader'? Who is he thinking of? And doesn't his idea of change sound like no change at all?

 

Matt Cooper in the SBP offers an unusual thesis on... what else... Sinn Féin...

The scheduled handover of power between the coalition parties next December, with Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar swapping the roles of taoiseach and tánaiste, will irritate Sinn Féin greatly. The party and its supporters want their woman to be the next taoiseach, not the returning Varadkar.

McDonald is itching to take advantage of the dysfunction within the coalition government, brought on by a combination of its own shortcomings and the extraordinary circumstances in which it finds itself – a situation in which any administration would make many and major mistakes.

Appealing to new Sinn Féin supporters, she will seek to reinforce the message that the democratically elected government, by a majority of the Dáil, is somehow not legitimate. That people didn't vote for a Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green coalition. That said, only a quarter of voters opted for Sinn Féin but such details will be lost on many.

This idea that the government is illegitimate, as distinct from not very capable, seems to be quite a stretch.

In the same paper Lucinda Creighton looks back on 2021 and in this outline of the start of the year gets the timeline back to front.

Instead, January 2021 will forever be remembered for the dramatic backward turn we experienced. The country shut down once again. The brief socialisation of the festive period was quickly consigned to history. We were all mandated to work from our boxrooms at home once again. And possibly worst of all, depending on one's perspective, schools were closed and children again had to endure months of home schooling. Covid-19 surged and, predictably, our hospitals creaked at the seams.

Of course the Covid-19 surge came before the 'backward turn' and was the reason for that. But why let the facts spoil a narrative where she takes pot shots at health advisors supposedly 'running the show' and directly at Tony Holohan. And all this apparently a part reason - in her mind  - for the rise of Sinn Féin.

Typical framing from Pat Leahy this weekend.

Writing in these pages last week, Anne Harris divined a sense that young people are preparing to give an "almighty wallop" to the old establishment parties that have suborned their interests to those of the more comfortable classes, the propertied, tenured, Covid-averse middle-aged and over. She is not the only one; whitewatering downstream from culture to politics, my colleague Una Mullally feels it too. Look at the opinion polls and it's pretty plain: 47 per cent of those aged 25-34 say they will vote for Sinn Féin.

Is there anyone with any sense who is not Covid-averse?

Well perhaps this character in the Examiner who, in a column that in its entirety seems to be essentially wishful thinking about the virus and the pandemic, appears to simply not understand that no health system anywhere, however well funded,  would withstand being over-run if Omicron turned out (and the jury remains out on this) to be as bad as some modelling suggests.

Contained again in Holohan's at times incoherent interview was the admission that all of this, by way of enhanced restrictions, is being done to protect the health system from being overwhelmed. Nothing has changed in that regard since March 2020, 22 months ago.

Despite €4bn in additional spending, the increase in capacity is marginal at best.

Surely, we should reverse the premise of our approach.

Rather than looking at it as what we need to do in society to protect our ICU system, why can't we ask what we need to do to our ICU and hospital capacity to allow society to continue?

Telling that the same paper reports on the same day this. Perhaps even more to the point is this person who notes: "Vaccination, the easy way, cannot scale up quickly enough — a linear process always loses against exponential growth. Nor can health system capacity be expanded quickly, and it will diminish as staff absences become widespread."

 

Anne Harris exaggerate much?

This extreme allowed the really innocent women and really predatory men to remain for too long in the shadows. Me Too has been that revolution. By purging and punishing sexual predators in Hollywood, it has challenged the disenfranchisement of women in all workplaces. Including, presumably the White House.

But is Me Too showing the signs of a darker feminism, where unsatisfactory sex has been framed as assault or any criticism by a man automatically framed as misogyny?

Is Emerson offering a very narrow timeframe for 'The Troubles' in the following?

However, the defining feature of northern nationalists in modern history is that they rejected "violent struggle", in overwhelming numbers, throughout the entire duration of the Troubles.

From 1969 to 1981, there is effectively no evidence from the ballot box of nationalist sympathy for violence – only the reverse.