PrairiePundit

  Islam Invasion  @IslamInvasion · 5h Ireland was safe you could have leave cars/doors open, kids in prams outside shops. Now mass immigration bought chaos to our neighbors: stabbings, rapes, unsafe streets for women and children. Time to unite and reclaim our land! The Islamic invasion of countries in the West has made it less safe in those countries. This is true over much of Europe.  Islam looks more like a disease than a religion. 

Red State:  Ireland Women's Basketball Team Refuses to Shake Hands With Israeli Squad, but Israel Gets Last Laugh ...  The backstory was that there had been a talk of Ireland boycotting the game over the Israel-Hamas war. The Ireland team CEO confirmed that. But then they found out that they could incur  big penalties if they did that. According to the BBC, Basketball Ireland CEO John Feehan said the team was told that they would be hit with massive fines if they boycotted the game.  "I'm pretty sure we'd be hit pretty hard because we did actually ask was there an alternative to playing this game and all the rest of it, and from that perspective there isn't," he said.  That earned a reaction from an Israeli player Dor Sa'ar that they were being antisemitic. We have to show that we’re better than them and win. We talk about it among ourselves, We know they don’t love us and we will leave everything on the field always and in this game especially. The Irish ...

Center for Security Policy: The Putin regime has mapped out a plan to invade Ireland, a vital telecommunications and logistics hub linking North America and Europe. Agents of Russia’s GRU military intelligence have been observed for years across Ireland charting its rugged coastline, deep harbors, and undersea cable landing stations. The neutral republic of Ireland has no military allies, so a Russian attack would not invoke NATO’s Article 5 provision on collective defense. Russia would meet little resistance were it to take over Irish deep-water ports, occupy the vital Shannon airport, and physically control or cut trans-Atlantic undersea cable network that keeps the world economy running. Northern Ireland, about the size of Connecticut, remains a part of the United Kingdom and therefore is part of NATO. Ireland is a prospective Russian staging point to outflank the United Kingdom and NATO from Britain’s west. Even without invading, Russia is using Ireland to tap into the ...

NY Times: We’re in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here? Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth. You want growth.  Cut corporate taxes.  That is what Ireland did and it has had spectacular growth . If you look within the US, the low tax, low regulation states have better growth than the high tax high regulation states.  Compare the Growth in Texas with that in the large blue states like California, Illinois, and New York. The Obama policies have harmed the US economy and Hillary Clinton is promising more of the tax and spend policies that have produced the low growth.  Her economic plan should be seen a scary in a realistic world.  Trump's incoherent response to them fails to make the obvious case that they do not work. In the business world, the pricing of goods and services is subject to the law of diminishing returns.  If you set the price of an iPhon...

IBD: Economists and financial commentators scoffed this month when Ireland officials announced that the country's gross domestic product had increased by 26% in 2015. They rightly pointed out that the arrival of numerous new multinational companies, which conduct the vast majority of their business abroad, had juiced this number. What was largely overlooked, however, was that Ireland's gross national product, the income produced in the country itself, had also grown by 19%. Growth in personal consumption, exports and imports also grew at impressive rates. Meanwhile the rest of Europe is experiencing virtually zero growth. And the U.S.'s average growth of 2% since the end of the Great Recession is 50% lower than the historical average. ... So how is Ireland achieving this growth? Largely by enticing economic activity in its country with a 12.5% corporate tax rate, which is about one third of the U.S.'s 35% federal rate. (Both Ireland and the U.S. have lower effec...

Jerusalem Post: IDF soldiers saved Irish UN troops from hostage crisis in Golan Heights, says report Without the help they could have been taken hostage or even killed.

BBC: Ireland is on the verge of securing revenue from oil that could run into billions of pounds. Providence Resources Plc, an Irish and UK company, has confirmed its Barryroe site, 30 miles off the Cork coast, should yield 280m barrels of oil. The money generated will depend on the market value at the time of extraction and on licensing arrangements. Providence chief executive Tony O'Reilly Jr said this was the beginning of an Irish oil industry. He described it as a huge success story, following decades of exploration around the Irish coast. "The great news today is that Barryroe is on a path towards development," he told BBC Northern Ireland's Good Morning Ulster. ...  They are looking for companies to do more drilling along the Irish coast.  It is too bad Democrats are blocking this kind of development off of most of the coastal US.  It is how Democrats are outsourcing jobs and energy security under the ridiculous premise that we will use less oil, if we dril...

Guardian: Ireland 's first offshore oilfield contains more than 1bn barrels of  oil , an exploration company drilling off the County Cork coast has announced. Providence Resources said Wednesday's results, which show that there could be up to 1.6bn barrels in the oilfield at Barryroe, far exceeded their previous projections. The company said oil rigs could be operational off the southern Irish coastline within three years. Tony O'Reilly, its chief executive, said the volume found in the Irish Sea could become as important to Ireland as the North Sea has been for the UK economy. At present Ireland imports 100% of its oil – a quarter of which is refined not far from Barryroe. ...  Good for Ireland.  This also demonstrates the utter idiocy of the Obama-Salazar approach to offshore drilling where they try to strangle domestic production.  There is no justification for a policy that restricts offshore drilling on federal control sites.  Not drilling in...

BBC: Louise Redvers filmed this footage showing how eerily quiet Nova Cidade de Kilamba is   The ghost towns of China, Ireland and Spain - full of large empty house estates - may be a phenomenon that is on its way to Africa. Built for people who never move in, they leave those who did with a worthless property they cannot sell.   Perched in an isolated spot some 30km (18 miles) outside Angola's capital, Luanda, Nova Cidade de Kilamba is a brand-new mixed residential development of 750 eight-storey apartment buildings, a dozen schools and more than 100 retail units.   Designed to house up to half a million people when complete, Kilamba has been built by the state-owned China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) in under three years at a reported cost of $3.5bn (£2.2bn).   Spanning 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres), the development is the largest of several new "satellite cities" being constructed by Chinese firms around Angola, a...

Observer/Guardian: To escape the gloom at home, Ireland's fans head for Poland Both countries have their attractive features, but Ireland is suffering from its own housing bubble, while Poland offers some good opportunities to buy old estates at attractive prices.

Daily Mail: Luck of the Irish: Major oil discovery made off the coast of Ireland just in time for St Patrick's Day This maybe the best luck they have had in awhile.  Oil was also recently found off the coast of Israel about 24 miles from Tel Aviv.  It is amazing where you can find it when you are allowed to drill.  Someone should tell Obama.

Image via Wikipedia Guardian: ... He bought three houses as a buy-to-let sideline between 2004 and 2006. Although he earned a modest salary of €25,000 a year (less than £17,000 then), the banks gave him two mortgages of more than €300,000 and another one for more than €200,000 – a loan-book worth 32 times his salary. The fantasy of becoming a property millionaire did not last long and now the farm manager is in negative equity to the tune of €250,000 and with a glut of empty properties on the market, he has no hope of meeting monthly repayments from rent. The first house cost €215,000 and his mortgage is €1,284 a month. He rents it out at €800 a month – a loss of close to €500 a month. "If I sold it today, I'd get between €160,000 and €170,000. I'm down €100,000 apiece on the other houses. If I look forward 10 years I don't think I'll ever make my money back, so I want to get rid of it completely. It's a noose around my neck," says Niall, who aske...

Image via Wikipedia NY Times: It is a measure of Spain ’s giddy construction excesses that 250 row houses carpet a hill near this tiny rural village about an hour by car outside of Madrid . Most of these units have never sold, and though they were finished just three years ago, they are already falling into disrepair, the concrete chipping off the sides of the buildings. Vandals have stolen piping, radiators, doors — anything they could get their hands on. Those few families who live here keep dogs to ward off strangers. Yebes is hardly unique. The wreckage of Spain’s once booming construction industry is everywhere. And much of it sits as bad debt on the books of Spain’s banks, which once liberally offered financing to developers and homeowners alike. Just how big a loss the banks are facing is unknown, at least publicly, and that has investors worried — the cost of financing Spain’s debt rose 18 percent in the last month alone. But the potential costs of failure go far be...

Image by The Prime Minister's Office via Flickr Observer/Guardian: ... Towards the end of the growth years, the country's financial sector descended into full-blown mania. Banks doled out credit indiscriminately and borrowed on international capital markets on a scale that far exceeded the nation's economic output. When the bubble burst, the government stepped in to rescue the banks, but their debts were ultimately bigger than the state's capacity to raise revenue. Ireland started sliding towards insolvency. Hence, the bailout. Not all of the boom was bogus. The initial expansion was driven by growth in exports. A young, well-educated, cheap labour force attracted investment. So did an aggressively competitive 12.5% corporate tax rate. Ireland positioned itself as a lean, buccaneering start-up economy, challenging Europe 's unwieldy giants. Membership of the single currency gave seamless access to export and capital markets. But there was a shift at the st...

Image via Wikipedia Independent: Ireland may be desperately short of cash these days, but one Irish businessman has just been awarded €10m (£8.5m) in a spectacular libel victory in the Dublin courts . The damages were awarded to a wealthy executive who took a case against his former employer, Kenmare Resources , claiming it had insinuated he had made inappropriate sexual advances to a female colleague. Donal Kinsella, a former director of the mining company , accepted that he had appeared naked at the door of company secretary Deirdre Corcoran during a business trip to Mozambique . But the court heard he had a habit of sleepwalking and that on the night in question he had been drinking and taking painkillers. The award, a record for an Irish court, was made by a jury of seven men and four women, who deliberated for three hours. The judge, Mr Justice Eamon De Valera, put a stay on the award with the exception of €500,000. Mr Kinsella said he was "exhilarated and vindic...

Image via Wikipedia Telegraph: The President of Europe warned that countries needed to “work together” ahead of crucial talks designed to secure the future of the euro. Stock markets around the world fell sharply amid growing international unease over the growing crisis threatening the single currency . The deepening debt crisis in Ireland which has spread to other parts of the eurozone has left the single currency and European Union fighting for their “survival”, Herman Van Rompuy warned. “We are in a survival crisis,” he told an audience of Brussels policymakers yesterday. “We all have to work together in order to survive with the euro zone because if we don't survive with the euro zone, we will not survive with the EU.” The comments helped spark a fall in share prices and the value of the euro across the world. ... The statement does sound a little overwrought. Either the Irish or the EU do not understand the problem. Ireland has gone from a high flier into t...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife Observer/Guardian: Student Niamh Buffini works hard and plays hard. As Ireland's No 1 taekwondo martial arts practitioner – she is rated 12th in the world – her ambitions include winning Olympic gold for Ireland. But by the end of this month her future will have been decided by forces not just beyond her control but seemingly those of her government also. Ireland is on the cusp of insolvency. Some economists argue that it already is. Buffini will soon learn if her fees at the Institute of Technology in Tallaght , south Dublin , have climbed beyond her means. Her father is a self-employed builder, which has recently become a euphemism for "unemployed". "My class size will have dropped by 50% by next year," Buffini said. "Even lecturers took part in the recent student protests over fees because society here is going to be left with very few educated people. My best friends have already left – they're doing bar...

Sunday Times: FIRST it was the sheer ingratitude of the Irish, then it was the failure of the Dublin government to mount a successful yes campaign. Now Brussels has found a new explanation as to why Ireland voted down the European Union treaty in June - a CIA and Pentagon-backed plot, devised by American neoconservatives to weaken the EU. The European parliament wants an inquiry into whether Declan Ganley, the multi-millionaire chairman of the Libertas group that campaigned against the treaty, could be in the pockets of US defence and intelligence services. The calls have been led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the firebrand 1968 student leader turned Green MEP, who pointed to Irish press reports that “revealed there possibly exists a link between the financiers of the no campaign in Ireland and the Pentagon as well as the CIA. “If proved true, this would clearly show there are forces in the US willing to pay people to destabilise a strong and autonomous Europe”, he said. ... They must hav...

Observer /Guardian: Germany and France moved to isolate Ireland in the European Union yesterday, scrambling for ways to resuscitate the Lisbon Treaty a day after the Irish dealt the architects of the EU's new regime a crushing blow. Refusing to take Ireland's 'no' for an answer, politicians in Berlin and Paris prepared for a crucial EU summit in Brussels this week by trying to ringfence the Irish while demanding that the treaty be ratified by the rest of the EU. The scene is now set for a major clash between the Irish and their European partners after a Dublin minister and sources in the ruling Fianna Fail party ruled out any chance of a second Irish referendum on the treaty. Integration minister Conor Lenihan said this weekend that it was unlikely the treaty would be put to the Republic's electorate again. Meanwhile, senior strategists in Fianna Fail said it would be 'politically impossible' for them to try to repeat what happened in 2001-02, when Ireland f...

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: When Colombia's trade minister visited the Journal's New York offices two weeks ago, the last thing I expected to come up in our conversation was Ireland. To my surprise, it was the first subject he raised. No sooner had Luis Plata sat down then he started talking about the Irish economic transformation -- from impoverished ugly duckling to swanky swan of Europe in just two decades -- and why a similar growth model is just what Colombia needs. Some of the necessary policy adjustments are already under way in Bogotá, he said, and with any success, the reforms can be deepened. But the big question mark is whether the U.S. Congress will approve the pending Free Trade Agreement. The FTA, Mr. Plata explained, is as important to Colombia's growth as European Union membership has been to Ireland's. To think that Democrats might undermine Mr. Plata's visionary agenda is troubling. In 2006, U.S. official development assistance aimed at alleviat...