PB February-March 2026
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Humper Trumper
The ugly Epstein saga
unfurled an illegally-
slow 3 million pages
on 31 January alone.
It took down global
luminaries Peter
Mandelson, who
performed the irish
trick of leaking a
secret document to a friend, and George
Mitchell, twinkly Irish-American peacenik,
forever.
Does anybody think Trump, sexual abuser
and Miss Teen USA king, was so ethical
he kept his mickey buttoned up during his
Epstein period?
Or as Alexandra Ocasio Cortes put it: “Wow,
who would have thought that electing a
rapist would have complicated the release
of the Epstein Files?”.
ICE not Vice
Trump is using provocation on ICE, Iran,
Venezuela and Greenland to distract from
Epstein, one of the few issues his base
care about because it contains not just
a conspiracy theory, but one which they
enthusiastically embraced before it looked
like it might envelope their hero.
Not ice, green
Trump four times referred to Green land as
Ice land at Davos. One of the reasons he
wants it is because it gains strategic value to
the US’s enemies as the ice melts. Perhaps
End of times
There’s a bang of the Apocalypse about
everything, under Trump and his gang,
with raging climate change and incoming
fascism though, compoundingly, they are
widely denied. Anyway, hello 2026 from
Villager.
Can you remember the
name of the Minister for
Education?
Refl ecting the general
decadence, European
governments, notably
Ireland’s and the
UK’s, are increasingly
talentless, and
forgettable.
Just ICE
Justice in America.
Nominative determinism in
Minneapolis
Never can out-of-control ‘law enforcement’
anywhere have killed two such nice people
as Renee ‘goodness’ Good, cheerful to her
ICE antagonists while on the school run
before being executed; and Alex Pretti, a
man who gave a Latino repairman a $100 tip
because of the crackdown on immigrants
and who intervened to shield a woman,
before being executed, Villager turns his
blindest eye to kicking tailgate of SUVs that
suburban militia behaving like Gestapo,
like Feldmantel-draped Border Patrol
Kommandant, Greg ‘bovine’ Bovino,
Leave it to Satan
Will Karoline Leavitt precede Trump into
hell?
‘Risk, the game of global
domination’
Fiona Hill, then Trump’s Russia adviser,
told the US Congress in 2019 that Russia
had “hint, hint, nudge nudged” about
“swapping” Ukraine for Venezuela. Maybe
give Greenland to the Venezuelans as
compensation, and style it revancism, a
transactional take on revanchism?
What would Britain swap for Northern
Ireland, Villager wondered.
On defence
Ok, if Ireland’s radical left is hostile to an
alliance against Russia, would it support a
military alliance against…Trump?
And while we’re talking of visceral
allegiances, Villager descends the socialist
fence to recognise the 20,000 killed by the
vicious Islamist regime in Iran, according to
doctors reported by UN special rapporteur
on human rights in iran, Mai Soto?
News Miscellany
Villager
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arresting its climate change might be less
controversial than invading it. But there
is nothing Trump likes more than runaway
climate change.
Green and dying
Trump has killed the Green movement. In
Ireland it’s as if the Greens never existed,
especially on social media.
Green and launching
Perhaps the most successful Green
leader, John Gormley now a film director,
launched his documentary ‘The Tolka -
your river’ in the Mansion House in late
January. Gormley invited a packed house
not just to respect but to revere our life-
giving rivers. Present along with Villager
was John’s son Seán who is about to
launch ‘Snot Rocket: Eine Bohemian
Schnapsidee’, a deadpan 15-minute
Irish short movie directed by him and
centring on Bob, a drifting, eccentric
figure moving through a bohemian milieu
where bravado, drink, and half-formed
philosophies substitute for purpose. Its
tagline is “Everything has an end but the
sausage has two”.
ICConent of any wrongdoing
The US, which
threatened to
go after those
prosecuting French
Presidential
aspirant Marine Le
Pen, has imposed
sanctions on two
International
Criminal Court (ICC)
trial judges, Nicolas Guillou and Kimberly
Prost, and Deputy Prosecutors Khan and
Niang.
They were accused of supporting
“illegitimate ICC actions against Israel,
including upholding the ICC’s arrest
warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu and former Defense Minister
Gallant, since they assumed leadership
for the ICC’s Oce of the Prosecutor’. The
sanctions ban the four from entering the
US and block their US assets.
In an interview with Le Monde, Nicolas
Guillou described how US sanctions
imposed after the International Criminal
Court issued an arrest warrant for
Benjamin Netanyahu have dismantled his
daily life. (Guillou’s not Netanyahu’s) “All
my accounts with American companies,
such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and
others, have been closed”, he said,
adding that even a French hotel booking
was cancelled “citing the sanctions”.
named...(my own choice would be Ireland
partly since I am “half” Irish on my father’s
side; also, have loved every visit to Ireland,
ever. plus, Irish literature! plus, Irish
countryside. plus, Dublin!)”.
Whistle while you...drink free
coffee
Paddy Cosgrave’s ‘Whistleblower’
café opens on Dublin’s South Anne
St this month with free coee for
whistleblowers, but how much Villager,
who tries to keep his hand out of his
pocket, wonders do whistleblowees pay.
Cosgrave still reigns as British Open over-
4Os doubles champion in tennis where
etiquette precludes whistleblowing even
by referees.
Bowes’ Foes
Chay Bowes is an Irish journalist who
works for Russia Today in Moscow, and is a
member of the National Union of Journalists.
He was the source of the 2020 Village story
about Leo Varadkar leaking a confidential
document to a friend.
Bowes has become the subject of serious
public-safety concern after being listed
by the Myrotvorets Center, a controversial
Ukrainian website widely described as a “kill
list”. Myrotvorets has documented links to
Ukrainian intelligence and security services
and has previously published personal
details of journalists and political figures. In
several well-established cases, individuals
listed on the site were later murdered,
including Ukrainian journalist Oles Buzina
and Russian journalist Darya Dugina, whose
profile was marked “liquidated” after her
death.
Following President Zelenskiy’s visit to
Ireland, Samuel J Rosenfeld, a former British
security agent who has written in these
pages, wrote to the Taoiseach, Micheál
Martin formally warning that Bowes faced
a real and immediate threat to life. The
Department of An Taoiseach informed
Rosenfeld it has referred the case to the
Departments of Foreign Aairs and Justice
but no substantive response has emerged
from Irish authorities.
Speaking his mind
Village’s editor, Michael Smith, is pursuing
a defamation action against Varadkar and
Teary Thierry
The European Commission, which
routinely fines American tech businesses
for breaching EU antitrust laws, may soon
find itself blacklisted too: to his chagrin,
in December Thierry Breton, a former
commissioner overseeing bits of digital
regulation, was banned from visiting
America.
Bloke was in bed: How
Common Sense Triumphed
in an Age of Total Madness
Villager reserves a special loathing
for British centrists who cannot bring
themselves to recognise authoritarianism
where we can all see it. Throughout 2025,
Youtube global bloke and recent hospital-
detained hip replacee Piers Morgan
combined his laundering of the early stages
of the apparent genocide by Israel of 71,000
souls in Gaza, a number now conceded
even by the IDF, with repeated takedowns of
people who named Trump’s fascism,
Spoiled for Joyce
Villager salutes
American author. Joyce
Carol Oates. Her work
frequently plumbs the
darker undercurrents
of American
life, combining gothic elements with
social critique and moral inquiry. She
won the National Book Award for her
novel‘Them’(1969), twoO. Henry Awards
and theNational Humanities Medal. Since
at least the early 1980s, Oates has been
rumoured as favourite to win theNobel Prize
in Literatureby oddsmakers and critics. No
petty arbiter of taste then.
Two of her tweets caught Villager’s eye.
The first is on Elon Musk:
“So curious that such a wealthy man never
posts anything that indicates that he enjoys
or is even aware of what virtually everyone
appreciates — scenes from nature, pet dog
or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but
doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or
relative’s accomplishment; condolences for
someone who has died; pleasure in sports,
acclaim for a favorite team; references to
history. In fact he seems totally uneducated
, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter
may have access to more beauty & meaning
in life than the “most wealthy person in the
world”.
The second is on Ireland:
“A recent article in the NY Times noted
that many people, especially women, are
fantasizing about leaving the US to live in
a more civilized country, especially one
without a gun problem. Ireland is frequently
Judge Kim Prost
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Section 2.2.4 of the 2003 Code of Conduct
for Oce Holders states that “oce holders
should not hold company directorships
carrying remuneration” which these
companies have always done. Even if they
do not carry remuneration the Code says
remaining a director is undesirable.
The limited enforcement capacity of SIPO is
such that, nearly a year after the complaint
was lodged, Healy-Rae has not even seen fit
to resign from these directorships.
Reilly and Maguire escape
consequence at Meath
County Council
The Chief
Executive of
Meath County
Council, Kieran
Kehoe, has told
the elected
members
that there is
nothing he can
do about the behaviour of former Fianna
Fáil Councillor, Tommy Reilly, who was the
subject of severe criticism by SIPO last year.
Village readers will recall that Reilly
attended a pre-planning meeting in July
2017 to discuss a planning and zoning
application by his son, Ciarán, on lands he
owned at Liscarton, outside Navan.
The SIPO hearing followed a complaint
from Village’s editor, grounded in a Village
investigation, which revealed that Ciarán
Reilly purchased the lands in 2016 for
€500,000 and that their value increased to
over €4.5 million following its re-zoning by
the Council just a year later.
Tommy Reilly attended several meetings
between July 2016 and July 2017 when he
failed to disclose his son’s interest in the
lands. SIPO said this was a contravention
that was “committed recklessly” and a
“serious matter”.
SIPO also exposed former Chief Executive,
Jackie Maguire, over the weakness of her
response to Reilly’s breach of the rules.
After an internal inquiry, Maguire concluded
that Reilly had “inadvertently breached” the
Ethical Framework for Councillors. Another
senior planner, Patrick Gallagher, who
chaired pre-planning meetings attended by
Reilly and his son, also failed to raise the
conflicts of interest involved.
At a specially convened and private meeting
of Councillors in December, Kehoe told the
elected members that no action could be
taken against Reilly, Maguire or Gallagher
as they had all retired. He assured the
elected members that new procedures
were in place to ensure that Councillors did
not attend planning meetings or represent
applications involving their relatives.
An attempt by some Sinn Féin and
independent councillors to formally debate
the matter at the monthly meeting of the
Council was successfully resisted. Move on,
nothing to see here!
Healy, Hooray
Good to see vindication of Fiona McLoughlin-
Healy who was forced to resign from the
Kildare and Wicklow Education Training
Board as covered in detail by Frank Connolly
in these pages nearly a decade. Over 170
charges were preferred in late January
against four protagonists, including former
CEO Seán Ashe and his son John, mostly
centring on corrupt payments concerning
the awards of contracts for works to
Blessington and St Conleth’s Community
Colleges.
Rhymes with IT
If only the Irish Times’ political coverage
were as analytical as its rugby coverage.
Blinkered view
‘The Irish Times view’ (what passes for its
editorial) pronounced about global heating
as follows on 7 January — “on cutting
emissions: focus on the big targets”.
Well, we’re going to miss our 2030 target
by a hysterical more than 50% and the
reason is that we didn’t make the target
justiciable. Justiciability was the problem,
that’s why everyone was so focused on
the wording of the legislation when it was
drafted. “Focus on the big targets” doesn’t
have the same ring as “Hit the target (by
making it justiciable)”. That’s because it’s
a political goal when it had been agreed
the goal should be made legal. If the Irish
Times were more serious it would question
itself why, on what it accepts is the biggest
issue of our time,it called it wrong and has
shifted its ground.
Darragh doesn’t get it done
The best case, according to the Minister
for Climate, Darragh O’Brien,is a 25 per
cent emissions reduction not the 51% the
Greens promised in 2021; and even that is
only if Fianna Fåil avoids sleeveenism and
if several large oshore wind farms come
on stream. In theory, Ireland could face
fines of up to €28 billion for failing to meet
its EU targets. Given that other EU states -
including Germany, France and Italy - are
also unlikely to meet their targets there is
speculation these penalties may be eased.
But the discourse has moved on, anyway.
James’ Shames
A Tralee woman is pursuing notorious
the Sunday Times whose columns the
then-Tánaiste used in 2022 to declare that
the people who “made and promoted”
complaints of criminal behaviour against
him (Smith and Bowes lodged the Garda
complaint) “appeared to admire Sinn
Fein[sic], Russia and President Putin”. But
Smith is also pursuing Varadkar over his
autobiography where he alleges he has
defamed our editor at least four times too.
Smith will be speaking to the Kilkenny Law
Festival on 6 March about the strictures of
the defamation laws.
No longer winner glinner
For those of us who don’t understand how
people move from genteel liberalism to
conspiracy-theory-Trumper, the case study
Is Graham Linehan. So funny in Father
Ted, so humourless and misogynistic now.
Villager’s theory is that when you lose a lot
of hope because your dreams run out, you
feel the world including nature, science
and the establishment are against you. And
maybe you’re right. And then you think it’s
all a conspiracy…
The Doorman Fallacy of our
times
You have a five-star hotel and it has a
doorman, welcoming incoming guests.
McKinsey or Accenture come in and say,
“Your doorman currently costs you X
thousand euro a year. We have defined his
function as opening the door. We’ll replace
him with an automatic door-opening
mechanism and an infrared human detector
and we’ll save you $30–$40,000 a year”.
They walk away, and they take the credit for
the cost savings. Two years later, the hotel’s
a catastrophe because the doorman was
doing multiple things, many of which were
unspoken. Security is a big one; hailing
taxis, dealing with luggage, recognising
regulars, providing status to the hotel. It’s
easy to see the simple things, but complex
things make all the dierence.
Hey, Really?
An article published in Village Magazine
in April 2025 outlined a formal complaint
submitted to the Standards in Public
Oce Commission (SIPO) concerning
Kerry Independent TD Michael Healy-Rae.
As the article states, “Healy-Rae should
have resigned from several company
directorships on appointment as a junior
minister”, a statutory requirement intended
to prevent conflicts of interest. Instead
he continued to hold positions in private
companies while exercising ministerial
authority, thereby “acting in both private
and public capacities simultaneously”.
Jackie Maguire
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development of the Ormond Hotel site,
the other side of the Village o ce, where
there were some shenanigans between
the developer, Monteco Holdings, and our
own editor, leaving the site demolished and
derelict for nearly a decade. The permitted
development permission is due to expire
in 2027 notwithstanding two extensions of
duration.
Policey in Tbilisi
On a recent charter fl ight to Georgia
that deported 52 people, 119 gardaí
accompanied the fl ight to escort the
deportees, along with medical sta , an
interpreter and a human-rights observer.
Since last year, six dedicated deportation
fl ights have taken place, resulting in the
deportation of 205 people. A late January
operation cost taxpayers €122,000
and targeted 17 Polish nationals and 16
Lithuanians ”with over 1,000 combined
convictions”. Another interpretation is that
the State is facilitating the early release
of serious criminals, albeit into other
jurisdictions.
Tech’s Neck
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC)
is owed over €4 billion in fi nes, mostly from
Big Tech, that remain unpaid due to ongoing
legal appeals.
More complex than
Dimplex
A recent piece on the excellent IrishCycle.
com website profi les Seán O’Driscoll, a
sub-Collison noisebox who serves on the
Government’s Accelerating Infrastructure
Taskforce which aggressively feeds na-
tional policy discussions. He is treated as
a leading infrastructure expert despite not
holding formal training in transport, civil
engineering, or urban planning. He holds
a BComm from UCC and is a Chartered Ac-
countant, and has hauled in a British OBE
and a French Legion d’Honneur. His corpo-
rate background includes being CEO of Glen
Dimplex, retiring in 2016, and a tenure as a
non-executive director of AIB from 2006–
2009, including through its state bailout.
He also became chair of the ESRI in 2020,
despite the institute’s research often con-
tradicting the car-centric and growth-fi rst
positions he publicly advances.
O’Driscoll’s investment vehicle has
holdings in life sciences and tech, and he
was once a major shareholder in the oil and
gas exploration company Barryroe.
The article concludes that O’Driscoll’s
prominence illustrates a broader structural
problem — infrastructure policy shaped by
élite managerial authority.
retired District Court judge James O’Connor
in the High Court for alleged sexual assault
at a 2017 book launch in Killarney, when
she claims he put his hand on her genitals.
O’Connor denies the allegations and sought
unsuccessfully to have the case struck out
on procedural grounds. A Garda inquiry
into the matter led to no prosecution and
a subsequent Garda Ombudsman review
also found no criminal basis. A few years
ago Village Magazine documented multiple
women alleging inappropriate conduct
by the judge in family court contexts and
criticised An Garda Síochána for dismissing
complaints and failing to properly
investigate or consider serious o ences
like misconduct in public o ce rather than
just harassment. One woman documented
how he had sent messages saying how well
she looked in court and pursued her after
he illicitly obtained her telephone number
during family law proceedings involving her,
in his court. Supporters have called for more
e ective police and judicial-complaints
handling for such complaints. Micheål
Martin concurred but did nothing.
The boy is father of the man
Veteran journalist
Frank McDonald is
plotting a book on the
destruction of Dublin
to rival his brave and
racy book of the same
name from 1985,
Apparently it has
evolved from an earlier
draft which centred on the corrupt collapse
of An Bord Pleanála. Let’s hope it shows
less of the prissy deference to architects
and favoured developers we had to endure
in his books of the 1990s and 2000s, all
with names like the ‘Transformation of the
City’. McDonald always described ‘The
Destruction of Dublin’, a genuinely great
work which ran into legal di culties and is
now a collectors’ item, as a “young man’s
book”. At 75, he seems to have realised it
wasn’t.
Losing our quays
A late-January submission from An Taisce
seeks urgent statutory action by Dublin
City Council on three protected structures
on Ormond Quay, Dublin’s oldest and best
preserved quayscape. No 10 Lower Ormond
Quay adjoins the house where Bachelors
Walk, RTÉ’s most successful comedy, was
set. It is now owned by Carnivan Bay
Property Trading Limited of 17 Saddlers
Court, Ardee Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6.
It was “lovingly restored” during the Tiger
as the elegant ‘Number 10‘ ‘venue’. It is
no visibly water saturated internally. 11
Ormond Quay Lower, and 12 Ormond Quay
Upper (owned by Malaysia-based Monteco
Holdings) are also in trouble. The report
documents structural deterioration, failed
temporary works, missing windows, and
ongoing weather damage.
Disarmed
Meanwhile in
Tipperary, the
Clonmel Arms
Hotel, comprising
early-19th-century
buildings originally
constructed as
Ryall’s Bank,
which includes protected structures, has
been largely demolished. The hotel closed
in 2005 and became derelict over 20
years. Two planning permissions requiring
retention of the historic fabric lapsed without
enforcement. Following a 2023 Dangerous
Structures Notice, most of the complex was
bulldozed, leaving a freestanding protected
façade. No planning application has since
been lodged. Councillors continue to defer
to the developers’ view that development is
imminent.
Dublin City and Tipperary Councils alike
refuse to register sites under the Derelict
Sites Act 1990 or to impose its 7% levy.
Quay Takeaways
A nine-storey building has just erupted in
place of the Workingmen’s Club to the rear of
the Village o ce, which is also on Ormond
Quay. The aparthotel is visible like a foolish
gira e over the characteristically horizontal
quays, Dublin’s defi ning artery. Now there’s
another application a few doors down on
Ormond Quay. Disregarding the architectural
integrity of the Grafton Architects building
at Nos 2–3 Ormond Quay Upper, it
proposes an intrusive penthouse and rear
extension that further undermine the sorry
historic quayscape, and proceed without
adequate assessment of existing regulatory
compliance, including telecommunications
installations which radiate down on the the
beleaguered Village team below. It could
too be a dangerous precedent for the future
New giraffe, over horizontal quay (left),
with now soggy facade of former ‘No.
10’, and boarded-up neighbour (right).
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