my year long subscription to ireland.com (the online site of the irish times) runs out in 14days according to the email i was sent. 79� for a years subscription. i think i’ll have to go a while before i resubscribe.

i saw these in todays edition:

gun law
on a dark and cold thursday night last january, a mercedes taxi sped across dublin’s north inner city. it careered through red lights at the north circular road, causing a six-car pile-up at the busy junction with dorset street. when the drivers of the vehicles got out to assess the damage, little did they know they had murder in their midst.
the driver of the taxi, niall mulvihill, lay slumped at the wheel, bleeding from fresh bullet wounds.
mulvihill, a well-known dublin gangster, had been shot minutes earlier at spencer dock bridge, on the north side of the liffey, while he sat in his car. a gunman had stepped from another vehicle, pumped three shots into mulvihill’s upper body and fled the scene.
the quick-thinking victim battled in vain to save himself. he sped across the north inner city, trying to get to the mater hospital, before passing out and smashing into traffic just hundreds of yards from his intended destination. he was taken from his car by an ambulance crew and brought to the mater, where he died a short time later.

how booing bertie has become a new sport
as a non-violent form of protest, booing could be considered harmless, even quaint. but it can be a deadly weapon, as mick mccarthy discovered last autumn. so although it has been well known for a while that the government is as popular as sars, it was still shocking to hear bertie ahern booed by fellow dublin supporters in clones last sunday. and no surprise when maurice ahern felt compelled to defend his sports-mad brother during the week, writing poignantly of how the taoiseach, as a boy, “picked and snipped gooseberries” for ticket money.

saving muslim women from a piece of cloth
nothing is as certain to make you unpopular in a french gathering – whether left- or right-wing – as saying you don’t understand the fuss about le foulard islamique.
i recently committed the faux pas of asking: “if a muslim woman wants to wear a headscarf, what’s the problem?” the decibel level of the dinner conversation exploded. normally rational french men and women, including one of arab origin, tried to outdo each other with denunciations of islamic fundamentalism.

never again…but only if the price is right
never again, we will not stand idly by, not on our watch – the world has many ways of promising it will intervene to prevent the commission of evil. but as samantha power’s compelling account of the last 100 years of crimes against humanity, a problem from hell: america in the age of genocide, shows, the truth is very different.
power, an irish-born journalist-turned-human rights researcher, takes her readers on a tour of 20th century genocides, in the process demonstrating that the western powers knew about the horrors being perpetrated but chose not to take any meaningful action.

i used to read the irish independent when i was growing up. the back page was the best part. full of world news and it had little 6liner pieces to the side that covered things as diverse as forest fires, to kittens stuck in trees to african genocide. i stopped liking the newspaper when i started to realise that they bought all their stories. not an overly bad thing, but it was like having a foreign correspondant for free. at the end of every story you saw “(c) daily telegraph” or “(c) the independent (of london)”. so i moved to the irish times aged 16 or so. i loved reading their correspondants based in some remote and exotic place like china or (erm.. ) france or isreal. they had random letters from correspondants talking about daily life in whereever.

i bought it almost every day in college, half price for students! hurray. i bought it every day when i was working in dublin. (more often than not spending the first hour of work reading it). i havent seen it for sale here in helsinki. im almost completely sure its not here. so, apart from random issues sent by friends and family from home, i wont be able to read it anymore. life goes on.