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Martin McGrath

@martinmcgrath.bsky.social
442 followers 589 following 3.6K posts

Tries to be funny, often fails. Irish, Labour, LFC, NUJ & CIPR. Has a PhD, isn't afraid to use it. University lecturer in PR, branding & design, also sometime journalist, writer & editor. Will work for karma. "He's not angry, he always sounds like that."

PostsRepliesMedia
Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 3h
At the risk of upsetting people of a religious and/or royalist conviction, isn't it time we based the ceremony of swearing not to be a shit MP on something more substantial than unmeasurable religious conviction and vague royal affiliation?
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 8h
Well, this is depressing... www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
‘Shocking and sobering’: UK bird populations fall to lowest level on record
Nearly half of species are in decline, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit, conservation bodies say
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 8h
Since you can't copyright AI produced code, I assume there is - somewhere down the line - going to be a horrible mess of litigation and dispute over the rights to all this slopcode software.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 9h
The sinking of the bloody Titanic.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
"You're out!" "I'm not!" "He took your middle stump out of the ground, YOU'RE OUT!" "And which one of us is infallible?" "I said you're o-" "I.N.F.A.L-" "OUT!" -L.I.B.L.E." [Debate continues for some time]
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
There's something satisfying about a twin-engined WW2 prop fighter - they all have a kind of elegant murderousness (except the P61, which looks like a lumpy pig with wings) Today In Aviation History: First Flight of the Westland Whirlwind - Vintage Aviation News share.google/564KL1CvqEjA...
share.google
Today In Aviation History: First Flight of the Westland Whirlwind - Vintage Aviation News
Eighty-eight years ago today, the Westland Whirlwind took to the skies for the first time. Designed as a high-performance interceptor, the innovative fighter combined twin-engine reliability with conc...
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
If you compare the by-election to the last GE, Polanski managed, crudely, to bring together existing Greens, Feinstein's angry Corbynists and a chunk of Lib Dems. That's a pretty good outcome but Labour will be happy enough that, nationally, that coalition doesn't look like much of a threat.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I know it's not nice to mock how others look (and god knows I am no oil-painting) but Susan Dell really does look like she's taken a picture of The Joker to a plastic surgeon and gone "one of these please"
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The heat death of the universe.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Badenoch wants her Conservative Party to be ready to fight a "battle of ideas". That's very... brave.
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Reposted by Martin McGrath
Svetovid @svetovid.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Well, that's a hell of a thing to leave next to a statue of Joan of Arc.😏
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
If we built a real iron dome how big would it have to be so that we could we put all the Conservatives under it?
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Watch the skies! Keep your eyes peeled! If I combined this story with my favorite dad joke (*throws a pea across the table* "What's that? ... It's an esca-pea!") I could have the perfect mash-up. This drone delivery idea sounds half-baked. Sorry.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The fact that it is inevitable that AI's money burning machines must create inequalities of access (and that these inequalities will directly reflect already deeply engrained societal unfairnesses) is precisely why hate the idea of an AI free-for-all in education share.google/Jgh6DBXwMb1N...
share.google
Google is changing which models you can access on its Gemini AI plans — here's what you need to know
If you want access to the best models inside Gemini, you're going to have to start paying for them.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
"Brian! ... Brian! ... Down here! ... Brian!"
A group of flamingos watch the skies.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
As my daughter just said: "If you said any of that in an A&E you'd be sectioned, but on Fox News religious psychosis is an electoral bonus."
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
And yet here I stand to defend of "Ascent of the North Face of the Uxbridge Road", an underappreciated favourite. "I'm guttering, laying-back at the same time and philosophizing" www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U0t...
youtube.com
Monty Python - Climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Road
YouTube video by feraldarryl
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Their problem would be finding anyone to be a faithful.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is genuinely the weirdest thing I have ever seen a British political party do. It belongs in pride of place in a museum of the politically peculiar with the EdStone, Ed Davey's paddle board and Boris Johnson's zipline.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I would pay good money for a Gruffalo/Reacher crossover... That mouse's reign of terror must end!
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I thought this was a joke. This is not a joke. Can anyone tell me if Kemi is the one trying to stop the boats or the one crossing the channel illegally in this... confection?
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It's the biggest night in Edendork since they stopped the bingo at the old dance hall. Good luck in the Tyrone senior football final #GAA
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It's a question on the citizenship test now
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Radical socialist R.H. Tawney-Owl turned out to be a poor choice for their posh party. "Twit-capitalism-encourages-acquisitiveness-and-corrupts-everyone-twoo!" (pretty narrow audience for that joke)
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
A Celebrity Traitors where there *were* fluffers would be a *very* different show.
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Reposted by Martin McGrath
WWN @waterfordwhispers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"But Alternative Parade Route Wouldn't Allow Us To Pointlessly Create Tensions" Orange Order Confirm waterfordwhispersnews.com/2026/09/2…
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Was this the face that launched a thousand riffs...
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Legal Advise is an innocent man!
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Exactly. He got quite cross 😂
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I'm impressed at your self control. At a colonoscopy a while ago I got told off by the surgeon for laughing at my own stream of terrible arse jokes.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I find it weird that people (not just you) think his first error in public comms is the football when he spent a week saying he would block a border poll in Northern Ireland until someone finally took him aside and explained that it wasn't in his power. "Forget it Jake, it's Stewartstown."
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
THEY SHOULD HAVE KILLED ROSS KEMP TO TAKE THE HEAT OFF R.E.G. AND PUT BELLA IN THE FRAME but, also, they just should have killed Ross Kemp
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Get in. Sell up. Get out. Hope you can get it all done before the bubble bursts. Run off to the hills with the cash.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Like filling in tax returns?
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Just before the first torpedo hit home, high on a mast of the lonely Gambetto, a look-out reported hearing someone singing "I have confidence in confidence alone! Besides which, you see, I have confidence in me!" but was ignored because everyone decided it was just silly.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"Flower of Scotland" is pure 2 o'clock in the morning, come on y'bastards if you think you're hard enough, banger of a sing-a-long national anthem.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Voting reform without constitutional change is putting lipstick on a pig. A proper constitutional convention is what the UK needs, but won't get.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Voting reform should be the end of a process of constitutional reform. First, decide the kind of state you want. Then, decide the institutions you need create that state. Then, decide how they should work together. Then, decide how you want to elect people to those institutions.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Perhaps this is how humanity will go extinct...
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
As someone who has worked in in-house comms being a member of the workplace recognized union and the NUJ had made sense at lots of points. Also, when I joined the NUJ (lo these many years) getting in was such a pain that I've always been reluctant to give it up.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Beginning to wonder if this Fairford thing a Slow Horses cosplay gone wrong.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I look forward to the government "doubling down on compromise" when Tommy Robinson and his blackshirts turn up at the gates of Downing Street demanding their right to march past No.10's front door.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
My aunt has been out there all day, a mild and almost entirely non-political woman who has had a horrible year losing her husband and two brothers, but who is just sick of these twats who think it's their god-given right to show they still have the whip hand.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Is this a dagger I see before me, Handle towards my...fuck, that's sharp!
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
"DAMMIT JIM! I'M A DOCTOR, NOT A PHYSIOTHERAPIST!" Very enterprising BUPA.
A still from a BUPA advert.

Their app shows a physio appointment at 9:00am with Dr Leonard McCoy
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I hadn't realized helicopters required birds to keep them flying (I don't understand helicopter magic) but solidarity with our striking avian comrades If you think I am going to apologize for that, you don't know me at all...
A picture of a Chinook - a large, double-rotor helicopter - sitting in a field of grass with the headline "Chinook helicopter lands in field after bird strike"
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"As guilty as an Emirati-backed sports washing football scam.."
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Study finds that some cats spend up to 94.3% of their time doing fuck all and are only active 1% of the time www.newscientist.com/article/2590... this confirms every one of my cat prejudices and deserves a Nobel Prize (delivered in a box)
The most mobile cats were free-roaming pets: in summer, they were active a full 3.9 per cent of the time, though this fell to 2.7 per cent in winter. The indoor and research cats spent even less active time. Littering and scratching took up very little time, less than 1 per cent each. Instead, overall, the cats devoted between 2.4 and 7.8 per cent of their time to eating, 4.6 to 7.9 per cent to grooming, and 9.3 to 15.6 per cent to standing.

If you’ve been keeping track, you already know there’s a whole lot of day left. This the cats reserved for their two primary activities. Sitting occupied them for 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time, while a whopping 34.8 to 52.9 per cent went to the really important one: lying.
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
A bunch of people living in a society controlled by a load of computers they no longer understand... did Star Trek and Arthur C Clarke really die in vain?
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Martin McGrath @martinmcgrath.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
An alliance of the octopuses and the dolphins? Surely humanity's fate is sealed www.digitalcameraworld.com/photography/...
Three images of an octopus clinging to dorsal fin of a  dolphin as it rises out of the water.
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