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Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window
We’ve dined out for long enough on Joyce and Beckett; time to carve a new name on to the plaque of our national chroniclers: Joyce, Beckett . . …
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John Waters
7
Never Forget: The One, True, Irish 'Far Right'
The last far right in Ireland were the Blueshirts, in the 1930s, a foundational force of the current Fine Gael party, which was the party (since 2020…
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John Waters
Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window
The book remains an implacable enemy of totalitarianism, and is next in line to be corralled. It’s been tried before, of course, and failed abysmally…
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John Waters
44
Midsummer Musings
vital(adj.) late 14c., in physiology and philosophy, 'of or pertaining to the animating principle; manifesting life,' from Old French vital and directly…
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John Waters
Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window
I feel that this phase of my life is coming to an end — the Substack phase, I mean. There is still some place for the kind of record I have been keeping…
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John Waters
39
Report From the Front: If it's Scarriff, it must be Wednesday
'We became the spoilsports of the game of Covid, myself and some of my friends. And we were excoriated for that — and shunned, and banished. But we were…
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John Waters

June 2025

Diary of a Dissenter: The Week Through My Window
Big errors are more likely to come to notice. The small ones lie there, leaching out their minor untruths, which in time run into other minor untruths…
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John Waters
37
Through the Looking Glass, 7
The individuality of the tradesman is expressed in his engagement in a world shared with similarly engaged beings. . . This says [Matthew] Crawford, is…
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John Waters
Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window
The Dalkey Book Festival has turned into a showcase of books as diversion, books as entertainment, books as fake and misleading emblems of an…
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John Waters
42
Covid: the real and abiding symptoms
Covid has delivered us into conditions whereby the presumption of arbitrariness on behalf of ‘authority’ has become the default response to reality of…
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John Waters
Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window
What is a ‘contrarian’? Contrary to what? To the official diktats? To conventional wisdom? To the mob? These impulses, through all my time in media, had…
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John Waters
21
The Scholar Gypsies: On the Traitor ‘Taoiseach’
Gerry and I discuss the latest assaults on our country and its people from, inter alia, the individual with the temerity to continue leading its…
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John Waters
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