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Irish people’s love of slaying small furry and feathered creatures has traditionally grown in pace just after the celebration of the birth of the Saviour.
On my early grape-picking forays to France back in another lifetime, my Irish friends and I used to play a bar-room game we called “spot the Irish product here”. It was often over before it started because there were few if any Irish-origin products visible in French bars in the mid-1970s.
The belligerent persona that is Viktor Orban helps us realise one thing very clearly: joining the European Union is a slow and uncertain business.
I t was yet another of Leo Varadkar’s public encounters with the “truth serum”. He and EU kingpin Donald Tusk had just finished a press conference during which the Polish politician had publicly mused about: “What that special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”
For many millions across the globe, the Koran is a holy book always worthy of respect, but for others it is a text used as justification for the deaths of women, Jews and homosexuals among others.