iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

He's still brilliant, I was probably alone being bereft that his hurdy-gurdy broke

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

That the Orange Order still wants to march down the Garvaghy road speaks volumes.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ironically they don't get much media attention precisely because they work so well.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Thanks David, hope you enjoy it

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Thanks a million David. Yours was great- also lots of welcome myth busting and it was great to have the Ua Buachalla story verified in real time!

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

My pear tree is three years old and produced its first viable pear which I was watching like a hawk. My nephew arrived down the garden holding it triumphantly last weekend. Next year!

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ok it's got good. Fascinated by this- 44% of secondary students cycled to school! (Road deaths were far worse and with a tiny fraction of the cars)

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This has a good claim to be the most significant report in the history of the state

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I was thinking of exactly that scene. Nothing can provide moral validation like Tommy Robinson can remove it

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

That'd be the moment where you'd just give up

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Last week we'd a seminar from Paul De Grauwe. I found him invaluable when thinking about the euro for my Department of Finance book. He anticipated the risks better than anyone, warning about potential housing booms and banking crises in 1998. A colleague rightly described his seminar as masterful

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

That sinking feeling as you open a set of reports and realise every one of them was AI generated. It's so weird that we've all continued with business as usual.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I'm only properly appreciating the magic of antibiotics

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Oh god, like having to hang round with the cousin in 4- less fun than my actual life

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

From @jburnmurdoch.ft.com back in July. Housing is a problem in a lot of places but here it's exceptionally bad.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Michael's appearance on Living With Lucy is good for the prehistory here.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I imagine we're less gung ho on thin plastics! It's totally going to be something Scandinavian or Japanese that's nice

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

It's so fascinatingly hard. There's seemingly no market

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I hadn't heard of this and am going to go down such a rabbit hole on it!

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

It's like a very laboured metaphor

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

If we were being honest they're probably our national tree at this stage

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

The mercy of that cold snap in 2010 was it killed a bunch of them. They were very trendy in suburban Dublin in the eighties

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

There are queues at the car washes. There's a logic to letting businesses use water but the upshot is the restrictions don't bite if you can pay someone else to do it

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Reposted by Ciarán Casey

Conor O'Carroll @conorocarroll.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Tonight, a new investigation reveals how much water each individual data centre campus has used in the past two years. But our findings also show how pharma plants have used more than double that of data centres. Story w/ @davidmacredmond.bsky.social Read just after midnight on thejournal.ie 🔜

A screenshot of an upcoming story on The Journal. The headline reads "Data centres used almost one billion litres of water last year but another industry used far more".

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

The Commission on Emigration (1954) bemoaning the lot of young Irish adults.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

From the Commission on Emigration (1954). It should be the county motto tbh

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

While running for office Michael D. Higgins observed that the Irish people are very, very wise. It rings in my ears regularly

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

This year has been 40% wetter than the long term average in Dublin. Have we managed to combine the worst policies of both the political right and left into one cunning package?

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

And data centres, obviously? Even by Irish standards, a gung-ho data centre policy while refusing to invest properly in water infrastructure is bananas

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

So much of the dicussion on mid-century Irish health metrics focuses on policy debates and the church. Any comparative analysis suggests it was almost all about medicine

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

You'd never guess who the neutral country was from this

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I'd to Google this! Deep folklore

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

There were about 20k people in these for decades- more than all the other residential institutions combined. There were another 8k or so in the county homes, which were in appalling condition. The common factor is the people in them were never in a position to advocate for themselves so are ignored

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

For years the mortality rate in the Irish mental hospitals was way above those in the Gulag. Mullingar was over 12% in 1947. Essentially nobody was dying in the prisons and there was huge variation across institutions. I've found no compelling explanation or investigation on it

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

In the late 1940s the Department of Health was proudly giving out free DDT as a health measure

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The first appearance of this font which I feel they used for the next fifty years

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

It's really fascinating in fairness. This is a pretty contemporary source but the most compelling I've found. It's a massive achievement in fairness and so rarely commented on

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Yeah it seems to be a combination of food price controls, decent wages, good public health interventions, and a lot of luck avoiding disease outbreaks.

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I'm at the point in life where I'm trying to distinguish between swifts, swallows and martins most days

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Will do- it's one of those data questions that I'm sure will take days and then get a short paragaph! It'll bug me if I don't though

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Absolutely, and I'm assuming the mortality rate for military age men would have been lower so removing them pushed up the rate. It's so weird watching every Irish metric get worse as a non-combatant when the British rates all improve. I just need to go digging through the British numbers properly

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Yeah it really looks like it was better food provision. In Ireland there was some rationing but prices still jumped 70% so you've a jump in mortality in institutions which is so grim. I'm now wondering if purely mathematically more people died here than if we'd fought and subsidised food prices

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Someone suggested this but I'd have assumed they're all healthy and young so the mortality rate among the rest of society should have been higher!

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

One of the weirdest findings on this material wellbeing project is the all-cause death rates in the UK fell sharply during WW2 but not in Ireland. The best explanation I've seen is food price controls but if anyone has a competing explanation please shout

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Deep in a statistical abstract from 1948. I'm actually amazed only 1% of @rte.ie broadcasting time was religious services

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

It's so galling. And of course it won't create a single extra construction worker or lower the price of materials so it's don't nothing for costs

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Ciarán Casey @ciaranmcasey.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

That's so brilliant! I in turn went looking and as you say it'd make some movie “A career of adventure that few could surpass” – Ballinasloe’s Jack Keogh (1902-45) – Military Service Pensions Archive share.google/W9gFWl5LXjCq...

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“A career of adventure that few could surpass” – Ballinasloe’s Jack Keogh (1902-45)

IntroductionJack Keogh (MSP34REF3138) was one of the most notable anti-Treaty IRA men active in the West of Ireland during the Civil War. His remarkable ability to escape capture was lauded by news…

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