Digging for Gold. How to destroy a civilisation in one easy article.

Nail bars which never seem to have any customers, leaving you wondering how they stay in business. Phone shops which have no expertise in phones, and charge exorbitant and deterrent prices for refurbished phones Bazaars selling everything from vapes to sound systems to jewellry to wigs to God-know-what These are some of the businesses which convince enterprise minister Peter Burke to grant them a work permit for a non-EU worker because they can't find anyone in Ireland or the EU to do the job. Money-laundering? Especially the drugs, prostitution, online fraud and people trafficking proceeds of crime? Trafficking fronts? After all, Gardai tell us some people pay up to €25,000 to get to Ireland? We hear today from the latest @GardaInfo podcast how nail bars are "employers of concern" for Workplac Relations Commission.

"The Circuit Criminal Court heard that “serial offender” Levers Zinca (31) targeted two women in their 80s, including a nun, as well as a wheelchair-bound man and a man with limited sight."

Have you visited one of those nail bars mushrooming up all over the place recently, and concluded the reason the non-Irish "nail technician", frequently a man, is wearing a mask, is for hygiene purposes? Not at all, it's to discourage you from engaging in conversation with what may well be a trafficked person. So says Garda Detective Chief Superintendent Thelma Watters in this new @GardaInfo podcast, from 20:00 onwards for this specific passage. youtube.com/watch?v=QtQ83-90… Is anyone joining the dots between traffickers charging people €25,000 to get to Ireland, to non-EU work permits, to Workplace Relations Commission inspections (which have dropped off under enterprise minister Peter Burke)?

PAYWALL REMOVED: Here is the full national data of Ireland's 2025 social housing waiting list broken down by citizenship for every local authority: gript.ie/full-2025-social-ho…

"We'll drop our shields, we'll drop it all, and let it all burn." Police trade union representative.

He exactly misunderstands the situation. The problem that society faces is turning imagined cash into real wealth. That's not going so well.

Whom does he most fear? The left in France have taken possession of the protests/ riots as self ordained inheritors of all things done by the young. That might work, and if I were Macron, I might not believe it, but I might go with it.

OTD 1601 M'joy stripped the garrisons in Ulster to meet the Spanish in Kinsale. Of 2k troops in S. Ulster single companies remained in Blackwater, Mountnorris, Armagh and Newry. Too weak to move beyond their walls, nothing could stop Tyrone advancing to spoil Louth #nineyearswar

I have seen men in bars in Dublin in Rangers tops. They were served like anyone else. They drank their drink. They watched soccer on the TV. They were neither remarkable nor much remarked on.

Methane - 86 times more powerful than CO2 over 20 years - is being emitted from thawing permafrost all over the Arctic. This is expected to add 20% to global warming this century, more later. Important when every fraction of a degree counts. phys.org/news/2026-10-gas-fr…

I’m sixty five. As a boy I knew some extremely old people who occasionally reminisced about old people they had known when they were themselves young. It’s surprising how far back one can go with eyewitness testimony on that basis. For example my grandmother (b 1883) saw the Diamond Jubilee procession of 1897 and told me about it often enough for it still to seem like a recent event to me now. More curious, Lawrie Tanner (b. 1890) lived in Westminster School where his father was a housemaster. As a boy he knew an old man who remembered shooting snipe on what is now Vincent Square. That takes one back to about 1840, say 185 years. Now there’s a point to this and it concerns the memory of the early Church. Irenaeus, writing in about the year 180, wrote that as a boy he had known Polycarp, who knew the Apostle John personally.

Pretending that Protestants are discriminated against and don't hold prominent and widely respected positions in the Republic is wild. Katie Taylor, David Norris, Graham Norton and Heather Humphreys are routinely celebrated in Irish public life.

Best policy idea EVER 🇮🇪 Banty alone could almost fund national free childcare for a year.

“the use of [most of the hotel] as accommodation for International Protection Applicants resulting in a material change of use of the former hotel” have been deemed to be “unauthorised development.”"

TD Michael Collins has called for a “windfall tax” on IPAS providers who, he said, have made “handsome” profits on the backs of Irish taxpayers. The Independent Ireland leader also called on the government to “wind down” IPAS centres. gript.ie/collins-calls-for-w…

BREAKING: New maps show Earth almost entirely in the red 🔴 El Niño continues at "maximum power" into the winter with planetary heating dialed up everywhere EXCEPT the United States. Colder than normal in February --> massive "snow dumps" and sloppy ice storms. Wow!

Who knew that would happen?

That's a warm bath...

Marge working hard for a living here....