Only in Ireland would someone pebble-dash one of the last businesses named in Ulysses that still trades under the same name. 🙈 Rendered over, with blocked-up windows, it has a boarded, “locked-in” look, even though the business still trades from Amiens Street. Mullett’s is a long-established Dublin 1 corner pub at 45 Amiens Street, tucked beside Connolly Station, with a rear elevation onto Foley Street (formerly Montgomery Street, the heart of the Monto / Joyce’s “Nighttown”). Mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses: in the “Eumaeus” episode, Stephen and Bloom walk “bevelling around by Mullett’s and the Signal House” on their way to the Amiens Street railway terminus (Connolly Station). Google Street View: maps.app.goo.gl/cu3HyGSPLu8r… #Dublin #Ulysses #bloomsday #Bloomsday2026 #JamesJoyce

Very disappointed to see the casual disrespect shown to our National Defence Forces Memorial in Merrion Square - Opposite our @OireachtasNews Houses of Oireachtas -The Irish people are proud of @defenceforces Óglaigh na hÉireann Peacekeeping & the sacrifice of soldiers & families

17 June: the European Parliament votes to deregulate GMOs and abolish its labelling on food. Our last chance to save food transparency is to let the Parliamentarians know how many of us deeply care. It's super easy to call them and every single call counts blacked-out-ingredients.eu/e…

🚜 PROTEST IN STRASBOURG💥 On the eve of the vote on new GMOs (NGTs), more than 40 European organisations are calling on MEPs to reject this text that threatens transparency, favours patents on living organisms, and deprives farmers and citizens of the right to know & to choose.

Protest outside the European Parliament in Strasbourg this morning against the deregulation of GMOs, the scrapping of consumers' right to know, and the threat to farmers from patents! Take action ahead of the vote tomorrow here: blacked-out-ingredients.eu/e…

I get yelled at for saying this but children enjoy a challenge and it's good for them to read books that are a bit difficult. In my experience, adults are the ones trying to keep them from classics while the kids are aching to read Homer, Jane Austen and Jane Eyre.

A young tree is not a mature tree in a smaller size. It's a completely different system — and almost everything a tree does for your yard, your neighborhood, and the species living in it grows with age. 🌳 The gap between a newly planted sapling and a mature tree isn't a few years of patience. For most of what we value in trees, it's closer to a factor of a thousand. What scales with age: Shade and cooling: a mature tree can transpire well over 100 gallons of water per day, cooling the air around it through evaporation. Its canopy shades hundreds of square feet. A newly planted tree does a fraction of a percent of this. Wildlife habitat: the older a tree gets, the more complex its structure becomes — rough bark for insects, cavities for cavity-nesting birds, high branches for raptors, leaf litter for ground beetles. Research from the USDA Forest Service and university extension programs consistently documents that older trees support far more species than young trees of the same species, because the habitat features that wildlife depend on take decades to develop. Carbon storage: a common misconception is that young trees capture carbon faster than old ones. Young trees do grow quickly relative to their size. But a mature tree holds decades of accumulated carbon in its wood, and because its canopy is enormous, it continues adding large amounts of carbon each year. Removing a large old tree doesn't free up space for a better carbon sink — it releases a stock that took decades to build, and a replacement sapling will need 20 to 50 years to approach even a fraction of what was there. What "we'll plant a new one" doesn't solve: A newly planted tree stores tens of pounds of carbon per year and provides minimal shade. For it to deliver the cooling, habitat, and water management of a mature tree, you're looking at 20 to 50 years depending on species. At the scale of a human life — and certainly at the scale of a summer heat event — a replacement tree is a promise to the next generation, not a solution for today. The right approach is both at once: protect existing mature trees as working infrastructure, and plant young trees as an investment in the future. The old tree is today's resource. The sapling is a gift to whoever lives here in thirty years. Before removing a large tree for aesthetic or convenience reasons, it's worth accounting for what it's already doing — for free — that no young plant will replicate for half a century. 🌿 #MatureTrees #TreeCanopy #BackyardTrees #UrbanForestry #WildlifeHabitat

🇮🇹 We start the week with a little baking lesson. When it comes to Italian bread, the coastal region of Liguria holds the crown. It is the historic birthplace of Focaccia, and their absolute number one street food is the legendary Focaccia Genovese. The true beauty of this iconic flatbread lies in its minimalism. It requires just five humble ingredients to create a masterpiece that is beautifully golden and crispy on the outside, yet incredibly soft and fluffy on the inside. If you love fresh bread but have always been intimidated by baking, this forgiving recipe is the absolute perfect place to start your culinary journey. To elevate your experience to a truly local level, venture out of your comfort zone tomorrow morning: grab a freshly baked slice, pull up a chair at a Genoese cafe, and dip it directly into a hot cappuccino. The combination of savory olive oil, sea salt, and sweet milky coffee is a regional ritual that you will quickly fall in love with. 🎥 our_cookingjourney | IG

I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is. University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures. There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them. If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.

THINGS THAT ARE COMPLETELY LEGAL AND ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT BE: 1. Airlines selling more seats than exist on the plane because historically 5 to 15 percent of passengers never show up, and they would rather gamble with your seat than fly with empty ones. 2. Food companies printing "contains real fruit" on a product with almost no actual fruit in it, because the FDA requires no minimum percentage,technically one drop qualifies. 3. Gyms selling far more memberships than they have capacity for because they know most members will stop showing up within months, and the whole business model depends on it. 4. Banks charging you a fee for not keeping enough money in the account you opened to save money. 5. Pharmaceutical companies advertising prescription medication directly to patients in the small number of countries that allow it. 6. Hotels charging a mandatory resort fee for amenities you did not ask for and will not use, then displaying only the base room rate until checkout,a practice still legal even as regulators push for upfront disclosure. 7. Subscription services that require a phone call to cancel something you signed up for online in 30 seconds. 8. Talking at full volume on speakerphone in a public space while everyone within 10 metres suffers in silence. 9. Landlords charging a cleaning fee on top of a security deposit and then deducting cleaning costs from the security deposit anyway. 10. Food delivery platforms charging restaurants 15 to 30 percent commission per order and then charging customers a delivery fee on top of that, while drivers earn below living wage in many markets. 11. Loyalty points programs that devalue points after you accumulate them, expire them without warning, and require spending that costs more than the reward ever will. 12. Companies printing inflated "original" prices with a strikethrough next to a "sale" price,a practice so widespread and abused that multiple major retailers have paid millions in legal settlements over it, yet it continues across the industry.

Fantastic news for Cork. Tonight, the St Patrick sails from Ringaskiddy to Boulogne-sur-Mer — the first direct Cork-France ferry connection in 15 years. Direct access to mainland Europe. 250,000 passengers expected in year one. 250 new jobs. Cork punches above its weight again. Bonne route! 🛳️🇫🇷 #Cork #CorkHarbour #HibernaLine #Ireland #Ferry

Dublin's 1941 Sheriff Street Lifting Bridge is rusting at Spencer Dock. Surely it's worth a lick of paint? 👨‍🎨​🎨 #Dublin #Ireland #Heritage #HeritageAtRisk Below is a webpage I built to highlight dereliction in Ireland, propose solutions, and showcase heritage buildings and structures at risk. 📍 Survey Research Details: derelictsites.com/Not-on-RPS…

BEFORE YOU BOARD YOUR NEXT FLIGHT READ THIS A former airline captain named John Hoyte reached out to me recently. He spent nearly 30 years flying commercial aircraft, developed serious neurological damage, lost his career, and has been trying to get this story properly investigated ever since. He sent me documents spanning two decades. The scale of what is in them is HUGE. What he shared includes parliamentary records, a 320-page published report from the British pilots union, @BBC coverage, House of Lords testimony, and active litigation in multiple countries. This has been heard at the highest levels. It has largely been buried. Most commercial jet aircraft use a system called bleed air. Instead of drawing fresh air from outside, the plane takes compressed air directly from the engines and pumps it into the cabin. That is the air you breathe for the entire flight. When engine seals wear down, oil and hydraulic fluid can leak into that air supply. Those fluids contain organophosphates, the same compounds found in certain pesticides and nerve agents. Inhaling them can cause neurological damage, memory loss, and chronic fatigue. In documented cases, far worse. This design has been in use since the 1950s. The health risk has been documented for just as long. In 2005, @BALPApilots, the British pilots union, published a full conference report on this with the University of New South Wales. The following year, 27 BALPA pilots were tested by University College London. All 27 showed evidence of toxic poisoning and reduced cognitive function. Not some of them. All of them. @BBCPanorama covered it in 2008. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee heard evidence on it in 2007 and 2008. In February 2007, 40 unrelated passengers on a single XL Airways flight were seriously injured by contaminated cabin air. Their cases went to court. Twenty of them won a US jurisdiction ruling in 2010. A UK coroner recorded a death linked to this in 2015. France has formally recognised aerotoxic syndrome as an occupational disease. In the US, a law professor is suing Boeing for $40 million after a single exposure left him permanently injured. Morgan & Morgan, America's largest personal injury firm, is now actively taking mass cases on behalf of passengers and crew. John himself was one of those 27 pilots tested by UCL. He founded the Aerotoxic Association in 2007 at the Houses of Parliament to support other survivors. He has been fighting for this for nearly 20 years. Almost every commercial jet aircraft except the Boeing 787 Dreamliner uses the bleed air system. The 787 uses a different design that avoids this problem entirely. That safer design has existed for years. That fact alone says everything. BBC has not covered this story since 2020. The UK Civil Aviation Authority continues to say there is no positive evidence of a link. The Aerotoxic Association has been contacted by more than 2,500 people who believe they have been affected. John is looking for mainstream investigative journalists who want to dig deep into this. He is an expert witness with decades of evidence and is willing to answer every question. He has a passenger injured on that 2007 flight, Samantha Sabatino, whose case is in the parliamentary record. This is a genuine story of enormous public interest and it deserves proper investigation. If you are a journalist or researcher and want to speak to John directly, his contact details are in the comments. I will add media coverage links in the comments section. Sources: @AerotoxicAssoc (Aerotoxic Association) @BALPApilots (British Airline Pilots Association) @forthepeople (Morgan & Morgan) gcaqe org (Global Cabin Air Quality Executive) @BBCPanorama covered it in 2008 with a full documentary titled Something in the Air. @heraldtweets @WSJ @FlightGlobal @TheCanaryUK @the_ecologist

The older I get, the clearer it becomes: people don’t disappear into gardening, baking, books, and long walks because life got boring. They do it because peace became priceless.

Cork’s most Instagrammable pizza terrace has reopened for the summer 🍕😍 yaycork.ie/corks-most-instag…

Every four years I attempt to understand football in the spirit of cultural openness one brings to yak butter tea or experimental jazz.

Climate change has destroyed one of th pillars of Irish life, every June for 2 weeks our young people sat in baking hot halls, being melted by sun beating in the window, while trying to do their Leaving Cert, while the rest of us got a lovely tan! Now it's like November outside

Every time supermarket beef shrinks in the pan — now you'll know why. I'm a working British farmer who doesn't supply supermarkets, which means I can tell you what farmers inside the supply chain can't. Modified potato starch is being added to beef at the processor level — not by the farmer — specifically to retain injected water weight. Legal. Declared. Buried in small print. This is food fraud UK hiding in plain sight. I'll show you exactly how the system works, what to look for on the label, and what you can do about it. The product in question is a roasting joint here tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/pr… Want real meat? Shop now : radmorefarmshop.co.uk Find your local farm: produceandprovide.co.uk

All wrong that we have money, laws and political will to stop heritage objects leaving the UK, but nothing for heritage industries.