People, it seems, are increasingly unable to bear the presence in a room of someone who is of different political opinion from theirs.

Every year I receive from the United States a number of Christmas cards, or at least cards that arrive at about the time of Christmas, that infuriate me.

Not long before the pandemic, the Irish state television, RTE, contacted me to ask whether I was prepared to speak about a different kind of epidemic, that of gender dysphoria and sex-change. 

It’s curious, and perhaps not coincidental, that those who search out and seek to punish so-called hate speech haven't yet turned their attention to expressions of class hatred.

"Sometimes, doctor," a patient of mine once said to me, "I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dyke, crying wolf."

They start with important truths — slavery was wicked — and get carried away into monomania.

Today's bureaucrats speak and think in a language of social-managerial gibberish.

It seems that an apology is demanded whenever some horrendous wrong is discovered to have been committed in the distant past by Catholic priests and religious, on the one hand, and/or agents of the State, on the other hand.

There is a gesture that I have detested ever since an Albanian policeman made it in my direction about thirty years ago.