Perhaps this is the EU at its best. While across the Atlantic states differ over how best to curtail women's rights, we aim to reconcile different positions on how to act in a postcolonial world (Ireland) while also honouring the million who died in the Holocaust (Germany).

Final student presentations on their time in Barcelona made me re-appreciate urban experimentation. It’s not about applying lessons learnt elsewhere but about creatively engaging with other people’s learning, courage and appreciating ways of seeing. Thanks Brian Rosa!

One of the simple joys of working for a couple of days in Paris is to experience a city that does its best not to marginalise walking. Desire lines become planned-for access paths across squares and intersections. That, and cyclists everywhere.

Spent some time accessing some recent construction sites in and around Paris. Boy! I know the Olympics are coming but building 4 new Métro lines (200 km!) in 12 years and extending numerous existing ones towards the ‘burbs. Eat that Dublin — Metro North anyone?

Bords de la Seine at 10pm. Remember that it was just 8 years ago that cars were banned from driving here. But what struck me is this: benches and seats. Just like that. No ‘gastronomy’, just people and BYOB. Public infrastructure at its most simple — and arguably best.

So I wanted to show our beautiful heritage to visitors from the US only to realise that it's now a whopping €7 per adult to enter St Nicholas' Galway. One is welcome only if capable of paying -- what does that tell us about ourselves?

Not in the business of sharing private news but to say that I am proud would be the understatement of the decade. May I present… my wife, partner and friend and now: MRIA.

After that memorable win in the mixed 400 m relay race, those fascist election posters pronouncing ‘ethnocide’ feel not just vile but positively stupid.

Genuine question born of neighbourly conversations: Can one call Israel a colonial state and still endorse its right to exist? Asking friends in Australia, the US, Canada and China especially.

I wonder why not more people understand that right-wing arseholery always ends in war because fascists always need an Other to justify their politics. Once the internal Others have been silenced, its to the external ones they turn.

Come on 🇫🇷: let us defy fascism once again (for that fight is never over)!

Well. France showed us. And let us not belittle the compromises that are required to fight fascism: some voters had to hold their noses while voting for a person they would otherwise despise.

Une question pour ceux qui connaissent la géographie politique française : d’où vient la couronne des circonscriptions RN sur la Méditerranée ?

Watched Beckett’s Endgame tonight and was struck by a prescient passage I hadn’t noticed before — written in 1957 and encapsulating our current malaise rather well. Ah, and thanks to Druid Theatre for making it happen.

Public space inside a public building. Another aspect of what Kopenhagen gets right — besides its fabulous cycling infrastructure.

And note the use of flexible infrastructure to support the use of this space. It’s as if users are trusted, rather than feared (and thus in need of coercive actions).

Thinking about the difference between 🇮🇪 and 🇩🇰. Similar size, the one colonised, the other colonising. The former a relatively young nation state, the other a mature one. Both in the EU. (1/2)

Does this explain the difference in how policies are designed to be implemented in 🇩🇰 while we in 🇮🇪 barely touch the surface of the policy/implementation nexus? In 🇩🇰, people are brought on board from the go, in 🇮🇪 they are, at best, an afterthought.

Genuine question: is it ethically tenable to continue to be present on a platform that actively constructs a hate-filled, fact-depleted public sphere? I know, we all had this discussion before -- but why share a platform with the likes of Yaxley-Lennon? Or Bannon? Or Musk?

What‘s surprising about the ‘abuse in schools’ scandal is that we tolerate the abusing institution to continue to monopolise the delivery of our school syllabi and to dominate the education of our teachers. A bishop oversees Mary Immaculate College in Limerick — says it all.