{"id":201565,"date":"2025-12-20T07:47:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T07:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/201565\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T07:47:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T07:47:13","slug":"ireland-feels-like-a-small-boat-caught-in-a-tempestuous-storm-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/201565\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Ireland feels like a small boat caught in a tempestuous storm\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some years are more disorienting than others. This one, at once intense and purgatorial, was scarred by humanitarian catastrophe and war in Gaza<\/a>, vast displacement and internal conflict in Sudan<\/a> and a cocktail of insidious authoritarianism and trade-war<\/a> fervour in the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Ukraine<\/a> defended itself for a fourth year, the drone incursions, cyberattacks and shadow fleets of \u201chybrid warfare\u201d lent disconcerting ballast to the view that Europe was not so much sliding into a direct confrontation with Russia<\/a> as already at war with it.<\/p>\n

With 2025 marking the start of the century\u2019s second quarter, the age of instability rolled on. The ominous sense that even greater disasters \u2013 geopolitical, environmental, cultural \u2013 are pencilled on our future calendars was a pervasive one, surfacing in poll after poll, meme after meme.<\/p>\n

\u201cThings happen,\u201d Donald Trump<\/a> shrugged in November as he dismissed the 2018 assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi<\/a> while sitting beside Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man US intelligence services say orchestrated his dismembering.<\/p>\n

As a catch-all, nothing-to-see-here, move-on response, it encapsulated the era of impunity, disdain and upheaval. Halfway through the 2020s, it seemed the rules-based international order was out and \u201cthings happen\u201d was in.<\/p>\n

January set the baffled tone. Two extreme weather events either side of the Atlantic exemplified themes that were to recur over the course of 2025, from ill-preparedness, a feeling of abandonment and questions about Government accountability at home, to disinformation, climate denial and a coarsened political culture in the US.<\/p>\n

Here, the record wind speeds of Storm \u00c9owyn<\/a> left behind unprecedented damage and became the costliest \u201cweather bomb\u201d in the history of the State. The perils of past dithering were laid as bare as the forests in \u00c9owyn\u2019s path.<\/p>\n

\"OwnerOwner Frank McHugh in February in his Co Leitrim forest, which was severely damaged in the storm. Photograph: Ronan McGreevy <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no plan, and you left the ESB<\/a> to do the heavy lifting,\u201d Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore accused the newly formed Government. It was a line that would find echoes in later high-profile criticism of how things work, or don\u2019t work, in Ireland.<\/p>\n

For many Storm \u00c9owyn mutated into a forlorn waiting game. In the immediate aftermath, the ESB\u2019s power-check website was consulted 12 million times. It was 18 days before some households got theirs back. Storm names had reset to \u201cA\u201d by the time a Government-commissioned review recommended improvements to emergency communications by state agencies and acknowledged there had been some \u201cconfusion\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the US a political hurricane returned to Washington DC as catastrophic wildfires tore through Los Angeles<\/a>, smothering the city in dystopian smoke. Fake pictures of the Hollywood sign on fire went viral, while Republicans, including president-elect Trump, falsely blamed firefighters\u2019 water shortages on Democrat policies intended to preserve a \u201cworthless fish\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"FireFire rages through a hillside overlooking the Fernwood neighbourhood of Topanga, California, in January. Photograph: Kyle Grillot\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

In a year that began with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> announcing an end to independent fact-checking on his social-media platforms in the US, it fell to outgoing US president Joe Biden<\/a> to rail against a \u201ctech-industrial\u201d complex in which \u201cthe truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit\u201d, artificial intelligence<\/a> (AI) can \u201cspawn new threats\u201d and there\u2019s a \u201cdangerous concentration of power\u201d in the hands of the ultra-wealthy.<\/p>\n

But few were listening to Biden. They were listening to Zuckerberg tell podcaster Joe Rogan about his plans to celebrate \u201cmasculine energy\u201d in the workplace.<\/p>\n

The new coinage for the influence of \u201ctech bros\u201d was the \u201cbroligarchy\u201d, as demonstrated by the strange sight in February of trillionaire-in-waiting Elon Musk<\/a>, accompanied by son X, pulling focus from Trump in the Oval Office as he fielded media questions about whether he was orchestrating a takeover of the federal government. <\/p>\n

\"ElonElon Musk, with son X, speaks to reporters alongside Donald Trump at the Oval Office in February. Photograph: Eric Lee\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

Soon after, while on stage at CPAC \u2013 a right-wing conference \u2013 the Tesla boss was handed a power tool by Argentina\u2019s president Javier Milei and duly brandished his \u201cchainsaw for bureaucracy\u201d before a cheering crowd.<\/p>\n

As it transpired, Musk\u2019s involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) lasted only slightly longer than the average handshake between Trump and French president Emmanuel Macron<\/a>. Doge itself was disbanded in November, though in the whiplash-inducing style characteristic of the Trump 2.0 regime, Musk was by then sniffing around Washington again, attending the White House dinner for the Saudi ruler.<\/p>\n

Threats spawned by an unfettered AI industry ran from the psychological to the economic. Concerns that vulnerable users were becoming emotionally dependent on chatbots competed for news space with predictions that a tech-stock bubble was on the cusp of a painful burst. Do not \u201cblindly trust\u201d AI was the advice not of sceptics, but of Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google<\/a>-owner Alphabet, as he admitted the AI investment boom had some \u201celements of irrationality\u201d.<\/p>\n

The revolution was, alternatively, overhyped, misunderstood, taking a breather or only warming up, depending on who was talking. But its confused casualties were everywhere, from authors who discovered their pirated books had been used to train generative AI tools \u2013 \u201cfair use\u201d, US courts ruled \u2013 to British musicians, including Paul McCartney<\/a>, who protested against a proposed weakening of UK copyright law by releasing a \u201csilent album\u201d.<\/p>\n

Irish civil liberties groups criticised Government plans to enable An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na to use facial recognition technology, which is deemed a \u201chigh-risk\u201d AI system under EU legislation. <\/p>\n

Minister for Justice Jim O\u2019Callaghan<\/a> insisted it would only be deployed in \u201cvery controlled\u201d circumstances, but the worry, as expressed by the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council \u2013 the State\u2019s expert group on AI \u2013 was that its use would risk a \u201cgradual mission creep\u201d toward a mass surveillance society.<\/p>\n

\"Coldplay\"Former Astronomer chief executive Andy Byron and the firm’s chief people officer, Kristin Cabot, seen on camera at a Coldplay concert <\/p>\n

With news outlets happily dwelling on daft stories such as that of married tech boss Andy Byron caught embracing colleague Kristin Cabot<\/a> at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts in July, not every aspect of our surveillance culture could be pinned on AI. Sometimes all that was required was timeless prurience and a \u201ckiss cam\u201d.<\/p>\n

But this was not a vintage year for unshakeable tech optimists. \u201cSomething went wrong\u201d was the droll front-page headline of UK newspaper Metro in October after a bug<\/a> at Amazon Web Services<\/a> took out everything from Roblox to Ring doorbells. <\/p>\n

A cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover dented the British economy, ransomware kept Marks & Spencer offline for months and an attack on software provider Collins Aerospace in September triggered what was just the latest iteration of travel hell at several European airports, including Dublin\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The screen year saw a searing hit drama on Netflix<\/a>, Adolescence, reignite debates about the role of toxic online content in the lives of young people. Others grew extra weary of giving algorithms the power to manipulate their time. Social media, no stranger to sparking a backlash, was again the subject of one, with New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka arguing that ordinary people could soon stop sharing their lives online. He called this point \u201cposting zero\u201d.<\/p>\n

AI \u201cslop\u201d, bot-fomented hate, the desire for privacy and the real-life havoc caused by single points of failure on the internet all deepened valid anxieties about the outsize power of tech giants in 2025.<\/p>\n

As for Trump, he was fond of AI slop. A second wave of \u201cNo Kings\u201d demonstrations<\/a> in October saw millions across the US object to his expansion of presidential power. Trump duly reposted an AI-generated video of himself in the cockpit of a fighter jet, dumping what some headlines coyly referred to as \u201cbrown liquid\u201d on the protesters beneath him.<\/p>\n

If this year extended the age of instability, it also offered proof that world leaders had entered a new era of indignity.<\/p>\n

\"VolodymyrVolodymyr Zelenskiy is hectored by Donald Trump at the Oval Office in February. Photograph: Doug Mills\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

The Oval Office was the location for an unusually abrasive scene<\/a> in February, as the US president, flanked by vice-president JD Vance<\/a> and other wingmen, accused a straight-talking Volodymyr Zelenskiy<\/a> of \u201cgambling with world war three\u201d. For Trump, there was an upside to his ensuing shouting match with the Ukrainian president. It was all \u201cgoing to make great television\u201d.<\/p>\n

By the time Canadian prime minister Mark Carney ventured into Trump\u2019s den with the sombre reminder that \u201cCanada is not for sale\u201d, the Oval Office had transformed into what the New York Times labelled a \u201crococo gilded nightmare\u201d. It turned out that Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, had been speaking literally, not figuratively, when she declared at her inaugural briefing that \u201cthe golden age is back\u201d.<\/p>\n

That was not quite how a gloomy Keir Starmer<\/a> put it as tariff wars raged in April, despite best collective efforts to schmooze Trump. \u201cOld assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. The world as we knew it has gone\u201d was the UK prime minister\u2019s blunt synopsis.<\/p>\n

But while Trump\u2019s showbiz instincts for grand claims, sudden reversals and wild non-sequiturs found their form throughout a spring of US tariffs tit-for-tats, the bewildering pace of White House drama belied a competing narrative: that everything had stalled.<\/p>\n

Gen Z-ers latched on to a meme to sum up how they felt. \u201cRecession indicator\u201d was the tag nervously applied on social media to everything from the popularity of Labubu dolls to the release of a new Lady Gaga album. It was less a commentary on economic sluggishness than an expression of jokey despair.<\/p>\n

In Ireland, where Central Bank data again found that the richest 10 per cent of households hold almost half the wealth, infrastructural stagnation remained a dismally reliable generator of news and commentary.<\/p>\n

John Collison<\/a>, home-grown tech billionaire and one of several Silicon Valley-based investors to back a controversial project to build a \u201cutopian city\u201d in California, wrote in The Irish Times of his dismay at the \u201ctimidity\u201d of Irish leaders<\/a> and their penchant for ceding responsibility to unelected officials. \u201cWhy can\u2019t Ireland just do things?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJust doing things\u201d certainly seemed challenging at times when it came to children\u2019s health: The national children\u2019s hospital, which had an original completion date of 2020, missed its 14th, 15th and 16th dates for substantial completion as the relationship between Ministers and construction company BAM stayed sickly. The debacle prompted one of the year\u2019s 15 references in the Oireachtas (by 12 different politicians) to \u201cGroundhog Day\u201d.<\/p>\n

As for the housing crisis, the Government announced an autumn strategy to deliver 300,000 homes by the end of 2030. \u201cWe will be held accountable,\u201d Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin<\/a> insisted as he defended the removal of annual targets. Before the plan\u2019s unveiling, Minister for Housing James Browne<\/a> had some advice for aspiring homeowners: \u201cHang in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

But will they? In a Sign of the Times survey published by Ipsos B&A in April, only 53 per cent of people aged 16-34 said they felt Ireland was a good place to live, compared to 80 per cent of people aged 55-plus. There was evidence, too, that turbulence overseas had darkened the mood at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cIreland feels like a small boat caught in a tempestuous storm,\u201d Ipsos B&A chief executive Luke Reaper said, describing a \u201ctense\u201d nation looking outward to a complicated and \u201cunsettling\u201d world.<\/p>\n

That it was an increasingly unstable world for immigrants was obvious from the enthusiasm with which political leaders, either representing or responding to a surge in right-wing populism, rewrote laws to create a more hostile environment.<\/p>\n

\"AA US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Chicago shortly after Donald Trump began his second term. Photograph: Christopher Dilts\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n

An emboldened Immigration and Customs Enforcement<\/a> (ICE) agency in the US embarked on a year of raids, detentions and deportations. Britain\u2019s Conservative opposition liked what it saw and outlined plans to introduce its own ICE-style \u201cremovals force\u201d. Here, T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris<\/a> said he thought immigration \u201ctoo high\u201d and wondered why \u201cwe\u2019re not having that sort of discussion at a policy level in Ireland that every other European country is having\u201d.<\/p>\n

Faith that world leaders were grown-ups who would sort everything out took a measurable knock. Every year communications firm Edelman publishes a \u201ctrust barometer\u201d based on surveys in 28 countries, including Ireland. <\/p>\n

In January its report found that three in five people had \u201ca moderate or high sense of grievance\u201d, meaning a majority believed governments and businesses made their lives harder and served narrow interests, with the system favouring the rich. Fear of being purposely misled, including by the media, rose to a 25-year high, while trust in employers \u201cto do what is right\u201d slumped.<\/p>\n

For those keeping a close, distressed eye on events in the Middle East, helplessness was a familiar emotion. Amid intensifying bombardments and Israel\u2019s near-total blockade on aid into Gaza, \u201cWCNSF\u201d was standard medical vocabulary. Dr Morgan McMonagle, an Irish surgeon, wrote in The Irish Times<\/a> that its meaning had to be explained to him during his first humanitarian mission \u2013 at home in Waterford he didn\u2019t have any use for the phrase \u201cwounded child, no surviving family\u201d.<\/p>\n

By July the situation endured by the people of Gaza was so visibly dire, even Israel<\/a>\u2019s ally Trump, watching via television, was moved to say he was \u201cnot particularly convinced\u201d by Israeli denials. The children \u201clook hungry\u201d, he said. \u201cThat\u2019s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can\u2019t fake that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PalestiniansPalestinians pleading for food at a charity kitchen in Gaza City in August. Photograph: Saher Alghorra\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

Against all expectations his administration engineered a ceasefire deal on October 10th. But peace proved illusory, with officials in Gaza reporting that 360 Palestinians were subsequently killed by Israeli airstrikes. The oxymoron was \u201cpost-ceasefire attacks\u201d.<\/p>\n

The UN\u2019s warning of a \u201cgenerational\u201d terror threat loomed large as antisemitic incidents increased worldwide and two gunmen opened fire on a Jewish celebration on Sydney\u2019s Bondi Beach, killing 15 people.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, bloodshed in Sudan\u2019s civil war barely troubled the radar of the international community yet was found in October to be \u201cvisible from space\u201d. This was after Yale University\u2019s Humanitarian Lab studied the satellite images and identified 31 clusters of objects consistent with human bodies in or near the paramilitary-controlled city of El-Fasher.<\/p>\n

Modern satellite technology means most activities of scale \u2013 from the scorching of Los Angeles to the bulldozing of the White House\u2019s East Wing \u2013 will be visible from space. But the application of the phrase to the Sudanese atrocities seemed a particularly damning judgment. \u201cThe stain on the record of the international community is less visible, but no less damaging,\u201d UN human rights chief Volker T\u00fcrk said.<\/p>\n

\"SudaneseSudanese refugees wait to receive food on the outskirts of a refugee camp in Adre, Chad. File image. Photograph: Ivor Prickett\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

The simultaneous tragedy and high-stakes absurdity of the geopolitical year was underlined by Trump\u2019s confident assertion that he had solved a non-existent war. \u201cYou should make an apology to us,\u201d Albanian prime minister Edi Rama teased Macron at an October summit in Copenhagen. \u201cYou didn\u2019t congratulate us for the peace deal that president Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beside him, Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev, whose country had been embroiled in conflict with Armenia, roared laughing. \u201cI am sorry for that,\u201d a deadpan Macron said.<\/p>\n

A war that never happened is one thing. A war happening without official acknowledgment is another. Fiona Hill, who was the White House\u2019s chief Russia adviser during Trump\u2019s first term, reiterated her belief in September that Vladimir Putin<\/a> was at war with the West. Other experts agreed.<\/p>\n

That month Russian fighter jets violated Estonian airspace, while Denmark joined Poland, Germany and Romania in reporting drone sightings near airports and military bases. Belgium was next, then drones were spotted over Dublin Bay during Zelenskiy\u2019s visit to Ireland. Fears rose that underwater cables were at risk of sabotage, with one Russian intelligence ship entering Irish-controlled waters<\/a> in April and another using lasers to disrupt RAF pilots tracking its activity near UK waters in November.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Viktor Leonov, which has carried out spying operations in British and US waters, was spotted by the Irish Naval Service <\/p>\n

The Kremlin\u2019s response to most allegations of hybrid warfare was to brand Europe \u201cRussophobic\u201d. Nevertheless, the big new European project as 2025 neared its end was the establishment of a \u201cdrone wall\u201d \u2013 an anti-drone defence system that stretches from the Baltic States to the Black Sea.<\/p>\n

Alongside suspected jamming of GPS signals, electoral interference in Moldova and other tensions, Russia\u2019s alleged tactics acquired an AI dimension, with a London-based think tank, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, finding that hundreds of pro-Kremlin, English-language websites were \u201cgrooming\u201d chatbots such as Gemini<\/a> and ChatGPT<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As December arrived it seemed Europe was on the verge, but of what? <\/p>\n

Trump circled back to his view, made plain in February\u2019s Oval Office showdown, that Ukraine \u2013 the front line of Europe \u2013 \u201cdoesn\u2019t have the cards\u201d. Zelenskiy\u2019s response then had been a simple one: \u201cI\u2019m not playing cards.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year of card-game analogies, AI deepfakes, drone strikes, masculine energies and red weather alerts also brought the first babies to belong to a new generation, Generation Beta. They will eventually inherit the decade\u2019s debris. <\/p>\n

But whether we remember 2025 as a time of particularly high levels of mistrust, discord and calamity ultimately depends on how 2026 unfolds. The one certainty, for now, is that \u201cthings happen\u201d and they will keep on doing so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some years are more disorienting than others. This one, at once intense and purgatorial, was scarred by humanitarian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[969,61,60,43,106552,976],"class_list":{"0":"post-201565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-review-2025","13":"tag-weekendreview"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}