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Several listeners have got in touch with me suggesting I should publish a book I have written about my recent bereavement. That won’t happen, at least not for a good while. I’ll explain why, in a moment. A number of those who expressed an interest in my book have experienced loss themselves. I got a sense that they hope some solace might be found in reading about somebody else’s pain. While the grief literature is large, it is mostly impersonal. Listeners sort of know me (at least my voice) and that might make things a little more real, perhaps even helpful.

That book is about a 50+ year story involving two people who met when they were 17, stayed together for a while and then separated. They met again 30 years later, utterly serendipitously, in their late 50s. A scarcely believable love story then ensued. And then she died. In a way, so did I.

One of the first things that happens to someone – me, at least - experiencing the death of a spouse is that they become unhinged in several ways. I have become gossamer-thin skinned. Putting a draft book through the rigours of the publication process would risk opening myself up to all sorts of feedback that I really can do without. I don’t want my inbox filled up with rejection emails – or to send my book into an uninterested void. For my own safety, it will stay unpublished.

Here, briefly, is what I have experienced over the past 3 months.

Learning to avoid criticism and rejection is one thing. And that’s surprising: I’ve been in the opinion business for years and can usually let it all wash over me. So, the first big lesson about grief is that it changes you, maybe temporarily, but definitely fundamentally.

Avoidance of literary critics is one aspect of a broader lesson. I’ve always preached that we should avoid toxic people, but all too rarely put that belief into practice. Survival now demands that I do so. But it is hard to rationalise why I find some people’s words and behaviours so difficult to tolerate: I just do.

Here lies the second lesson: if something isn’t working, don’t do it. And don’t overthink it, stop asking why, don’t ask yourself if you are making any sense. If people aren’t doing it for you, if they upset you in some way, avoid them. It may not last, and you can silence them in ways that don’t upset or hurt them. Their words and actions may not be so extreme that the relationship has become toxic (although, in my case, that has happened). Perhaps ‘inadvertent triggering’ best describes what they do. Something is said or texted that provokes the emotional volcano. They probably – possibly – don’t realise what they are doing and have good intentions but terrible execution.

Everyone experiences grief differently. Not everyone wants to share. Avoidance of grief is common. There is a paradox here between the large number of people who want to forget and ‘move on’, and those who reached out to me regarding my book. Don’t let anyone force you into anything that just feels wrong. Take your time, move at your pace, nobody else’s.

But do move. The enemy is pointless rumination. That leads to darkness. That’s different to revisiting memories. But when the bad ones turn up, be aware and develop mental tricks to move on from them as quickly as possible. Say to yourself something like, ‘oh, here you are again, where did you come from?’ And then think about her smile.

Eat. I’ve lost 14 kilos. That really is very stupid.

Sleep – if someone could offer a tip or trick to cure insomnia, I’m all ears. The hours between 03.00 and 05.00 really are the worst.

Listen to a book or podcast or joyful music while forcing yourself to go for a walk. That’s you doing the forcing, not somebody else. The physical and mental health benefits of exercise, even a short walk, are not just academic findings. Exercise helps.

But nothing ‘works’. At least not in the sense of bringing anything like ‘closure’ – that truly awful word. I hate it. Some things do, however, help.

Seek out, deliberately and without apology, people who are happy to be with you and who let you be you. Friends who are as unfazed by your tears as your manic laughter. People who don’t feel the need to fill the gaps created by your long periods of silence. Nobody knows what the ‘right words’ are, because there aren’t any. Learn the difference between authentic and performative compassion. It’s actually quite easy to spot. Everyone asks ‘what can I do’: spend time with the ones who actually want, rather than dread, an answer to that question.

Pain is not just emotional or mental. It is physical: something manifestly awful happens to your gut. A low-level sensation of burning is the best I can come up with, but it doesn’t really do the feeling justice.

One relative, describing her own loss, said she felt like she was dying from the inside out, in a way that nobody else could see or comprehend.

Expect palpitations and heart fluttering. (For any medics reading this, the latter have now largely disappeared.)

Alcohol makes everything worse.

The switch from husband to carer is brutal. On the day of her terminal diagnosis, I was fully employed, working for myself. Virtually all my activities instantly stopped as she began the chemotherapy/radiotherapy regime that is much worse than they ever tell you. A treatment program that left me with lots of questions about its worth. She endured so much, but for what? A few extra weeks of life?

If, today, I was to get the same diagnosis, I would thank the doctors and refuse all treatment. That’s not advice, just a very personal view.

I’d worked all my life and on the day of her death found myself with nothing to do – for the first time ever. During her illness there weren’t enough hours in the day. Now, so much empty time. All the emotions repressed during the 13 months of caring hit me like a series of incoming missiles. They are still coming in, albeit with a little less frequency.

All those things you hear about the incredible doctors and carers working in places like Marie Curie are truer than you could possibly realise. And when medics are crap, they really are crap.

Watching somebody take 13 months to die takes the sting out of your own death. You fully appreciate its inevitability and that, surprisingly perhaps, makes you less afraid. But the manner of your death? That’s a different matter.

You will probably hear lots of stuff about things like ‘The five stages of grief’. I find such things useful, but only when adapted to my own circumstances. Adapt them for yours.

I do like the last of the five stages: “Acceptance”. Not the acceptance that leads to resolution, but acceptance of the fact that grief has driven me into a form of madness. Accept who and what you are in each moment.

I have some confidence that I will emerge from it all but am certain in the knowledge that I have become – am becoming - a very different person. I am curious, without judgement or reproach, about what that person will look like.

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At the beginning of 2026 there was a reasonable level of optimism about global growth prospects for the coming year. Against a background of intense uncertainty relating to US trade policy and global geo-political disruption, the global economy proved very resilient in 2025. Growth surprised on the upside and the main forecasting agencies spent the year upgrading their forecasts. This was due to the front-loading of exports related to US tariff threats; fiscal expansion in many countries, particularly the US and China; looser monetary policy; relatively stable financial markets; and the AI related investment boom.

The general expectation was that this momentum would carry over into this year. Then on February 28^th everything changed. The Middle East war has unleashed massive volatility and uncertainty. The real impact will ultimately depend on how long the war lasts, and unfortunately it is difficult to reach any firm conclusions in relation to when or how the war might end in a sustainable way. The US of course could withdraw and argue that it had achieved its goals of making the region safer and more prosperous by subduing Iran; toppling the regime; and preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Of course, none of this has been achieved, but in the world of President Trump, the truth is just an inconvenience. The problem with an early US withdrawal is that carnage would remain in its aftermath. Israel seems to have no intention of backing down.

So far, the impacts of the war have been dominated by severe disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and the damage to oil and LNG infrastructure. Higher inflation is already materialising. The first-round effects on inflation will be felt through energy prices, but the second-round effects will come through in areas such as packaging, fertiliser, transportation, and many other channels. The crisis has just exacerbated an already difficult cost-of-living and cost-of-doing business situation in Ireland and elsewhere. This is leading to serious political disruption (as evidenced by the lawlessness in Ireland over the past week), and many governments have either delivered or are planning significant aid packages. This of course will have implications for public finances and will seriously exacerbate debt problems in countries such as Britain, Italy and France. At least in Ireland’s case, the €750 million package will come from the budget surplus resulting from buoyant corporation tax receipts, but this spending will impact on budgetary policy going forward and the opportunity cost will become apparent as early as October 6^th when Budget 2027 is scheduled to be delivered, assuming the government survives the current political crisis.

For central bankers the dilemma between the impact of the crisis on inflation and on economic growth is challenging. The crisis in the Gulf will drive inflation higher but will also damage economic growth. Central banks generally want to anchor inflation expectations and prevent an inflation psychology from becoming entrenched. Markets are quite clear on what will happen, with the ECB now priced to increase interest rates by 0.5 per cent over the coming months. War developments will determine whether such rate increases are delivered or not. Personally, I believe it would be a mistake to increase rates in the current environment, but I don’t set monetary policy in the Euro Area. The risks to interest rates appear skewed to the upside.

I met an old friend for lunch this week, an individual who was very significant in Irish economic and business life when I started out in the field of economics many years ago. He summed up the world at the moment very well. There are four defining characteristics of the world today as he sees it, and I couldn’t possibly disagree:

· Uncertainty in all aspects of life.

· Geopolitical tensions.

· Economic volatility, driven heavily by nationalism; and

· Rapid technological change.

It is hard to argue with those four tenets, although all four are heavily interrelated and interdependent.

The nature of uncertainty was highlighted in the IMF’s latest economic projections. There is so much uncertainty out there, that it has resorted to scenario forecasting. It has posited a ‘reference’ scenario, an ‘adverse’ scenario, and a ‘severe’ scenario.

· The ‘reference’ forecast assumes that the impact of the war will fade from mid-year onwards. In this scenario global GDP growth is projected at 3.1 per cent in 2026 (just 0.2 per cent lower than the January pre-war forecast) and 3.2 per cent in 2027. Average inflation is forecast at 4.4 per cent in 2026 and 3.7 per cent in 2027.

· The ‘adverse’ scenario assumes that energy prices stay higher for longer. In this scenario global GDP growth is projected at 2.5 per cent in 2026, and 3 per cent in 2027. Average inflation is forecast at 5.4 per cent in 2026 and 3.9 per cent in 2027.

· The ‘severe’ scenario assumes that there is more extensive and long-lasting damage to energy infrastructure. In this scenario global GDP growth is projected at 2 per cent in 2026 (which is virtually recessionary conditions), and 2.2 per cent in 2027. Average inflation is forecast at 5.8 per cent in 2026 and 6.1 per cent in 2027.

The adoption of scenario forecasting is evidence that the IMF now recognises the folly of economic forecasting, particularly in an era when irrational leaders are so anxious to do irrational things.

Whatever way one looks at it, the outlook is dominated by uncertainty. The key risks identified by the IMF and others, apart from the war in the Gulf, include geopolitical tensions; shocks to the supply of essential raw materials, trade disruption; disappointment in the profitability of AI investment; prolonged fiscal deficits and the accumulation of public debt; damage to crucial institutions such as central banks and the consequent destabilisation of inflation expectations; and the collapse of the US as a benign hegemon.

Factors cited on the upside include the resilience of the global economy; the AI boom; the reorientation of global trade in response to US and Chinese trade tensions, and trade tensions in general; US protectionism has not spread to the rest of the world by and large; and the tariff burden is not as bad as might have been. However, the tariff issue has still not gone away.

Overall, it is a very strange and uncertain world now. Xi Jinping summed it up well this week when he stated that ‘the international order is crumbling into disarray.

IRISH RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY PRICES

The CSO has just published the residential property price data for February. Property price growth is easing.

In February:

· National average residential property prices declined by 0.2 per cent compared to the previous month and increased by 6.8 per cent on an annual basis, down from 7.1 per cent in January.

· Average residential property prices outside of Dublin were flat compared to the previous month and increased by 7.8 per cent on an annual basis, down from 8 per cent in January.

· Average residential property prices in Dublin declined by 0.4 cent compared to the previous month and increased by 5.6 per cent on an annual basis, down from 6 per cent in January.

· The national residential property price index in February 2026 was 25.2 per cent above its highest level at the peak of the property boom in April 2007. Dublin prices were 10.2 per cent higher than their February 2007 peak, and prices outside of Dublin were 27.9 per cent above their May 2007 peak.

The residential property market is showing some signs of easing, but one shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on one month’s data. Nevertheless, given the high level of residential prices; the uncertain outlook for interest rates; the potential employment challenges posed by AI; and the deeply uncertain economic outlook resulting from the war, the market should be expected to soften. The retail sector is certainly feeling the colder winds of consumer pressure. The big question is if the economic outlook is sufficiently risky to warrant a more significant correction in property prices?

IRISH MERCHANDISE EXPORTS (JAN-FEB 2026)

In 2025, Irish merchandise exports expanded by 16.4 per cent. Exports to the US were up by 52 per cent. Exports of Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals expanded by 21 per cent and accounted for 67.5 per cent of total exports. This sort of growth gave a major boost to GDP but was driven by the front-loading ahead of tariffs and was not remotely sustainable.

The latest CSO data show that exports in the first two months of the year were down by 35.7 per cent, with exports to the US down by 70.7 per cent and exports to the EU were down by 10 per cent. In February alone, exports to the US were down by 69.7 per cent.

In the first two months, exports of Food increased by 0.3 per cent, exports of Machinery & Equipment increased by 46.2 per cent, and exports of Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals declined by 53.1 per cent and accounted for 54.6 per cent of total exports.

It was inevitable that export growth would slow substantially in the first half of 2026, but it will put a serious dent in GDP growth.

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In a recent podcast I began with a riff on evil. It comes in many forms but always seems to end up with someone harming or killing someone else. There is a lot of that around the world today. In this post I want to riff on what might be called existential evil.

Philosophers, poets, and artists of all kinds have pondered the existence of our capacity for wickedness. They sometimes ask whether it even exists at all, or is just another human construct, something we do for no good reason. From Plato to Pinker, we often read wonderfully written descriptions of what evil looks like, along with analysis of the many sub-divisions of different types of evil. But the efforts made by the great thinkers, both ancient and modern, usually fail to convincingly tell a story of where evil comes from. Or what it actually is.

‘Something we do for no good reason’. There it is, the word that is the yin to evil’s yang. Without evil, would we recognise goodness? Questions like this are asked by all of us. If, like me, you thought about them as a younger person, you may have also decided that they were just too hard, nobody has the answers, and that it is pointless to try and find them. So, you try very hard to think about something else. Busyness quietens the mind. Don’t ponder the meaning of life or ask what’s the point of anything, and all that stuff.

My attempts to not think too much were only partially successful. Over the years I’ve tried to read the works of many a philosopher - and not just for what they have to say about evil. I’ve found most of this work fascinating, often incomprehensible and, often, deeply unenlightening. Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy offered nothing suggested by its title. The right - most important - questions are posed but definitive answers are noticeable only by their absence.

Any amateur philosopher must take risks that come with being not just in the wrong lane but holding the map upside down. Amateurs do have their place, however. At least, this one thinks he does.

While pondering the current state of the world it’s hard not to ask philosophical questions. Where does all this evil come from? Is it, in fact, a particularly evil era, or were we lulled into a false sense of security by the relative calm - for some of us anyway - of the half century or so following the Second World War? Is what we observe just a return to patterns of behaviour - violent ones - established over many millennia?

Historians reckon we have slaughtered up to a billion people during humanity’s wars. ‘Up to’ does a lot of work there – nobody really knows. The 20^th century is the one where we have decent estimates. Matthew White wrote ‘The Great Big Book of Horrible Things’ and estimates that 203 million people died in our recent century’s wars. That’s 1 in 27 of all deaths.

In my view, every one of those deaths is the direct result, and evidence for, evil. It exists. But we don’t know why. Evil’s existence may or may not say something about God’s indifference, but it is mysterious. And that mystery says something profound about us.

The added complication is, of course, that much of the slaughter was done in the name of God. No wonder we gave him up.

Would a public intellectual like Steven Pinker today write a book about the ‘Better Angels of our Nature’? He would probably try, but his thesis that we have, over time, become a less violent species might be subjected to even more challenge than when it was first published 15 years ago.

The amateur risks all sorts of schoolboy errors. The trap that AJ, the mafia don’s teenage son, fell into in a classic episode of The Sopranos is a perfect example of this.

AJ discovers from his juvenile reading of Nietzsche - whom he calls ‘Nitch’ - that God doesn’t exist. That everything is meaningless. There is no such thing as right or wrong, or good and evil.

That Nietzsche didn’t really say this is beside the point (and did try to suggest a relacement for God, albeit one not to everybody’s taste). AJ’s angst was later to be called existential.

AJ’s epistemic mistake is one of evil’s roots. The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus would have corrected his error and would have gently told the young Soprano that God does exist but isn’t that interested in him.

For Epicurus, the idea that God interferes in human affairs is refuted by the existence of evil. God is either too feeble to resist evil or is too busy working on less ambitious projects to worry about mere humans - or isn’t really very nice. God may or may not exist, but prayer is pointless. Unless, modern shrinks might say, as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy.

I think Epicurus missed something. Scientists often tell us that everything about humanity has an evolutionary point. We acquire physical, behavioural attributes and traits to improve our odds of survival. Evil seems to fly in the face of this logic. Evil directly threatens the existence of individuals and, in the limit, our species. So what are the evolutionary roots of evil? Much as the ologists might try to argue the contrary, there really is nothing to commend evil from an evolutionary perspective.

If I think evil is both real and mysterious, what have the great thinkers said? Plato reckoned it is an absence, particularly of knowledge. My interpretation of this is that he in effect argues that only (or mostly) the ignorant or stupid do evil things. I’ve met plenty of super smart, very bad people so I’m with Aristotle, Plato’s famous student, who said evil is a choice, something we know.

Several other ancient thinkers talked about evil that fills the space created by the absence of good. This merely asks the question, ‘what is good?’

Once the religious thinkers got going, we read lectures about original sin and the corruption of free will. Thomas Acquinas distinguished between sin, death and human imperfection – each being one category of evil. For Kant, evil is not ignorance but the corruption of our free will. Several writers, particularly Hannah Arendt, talk about The Banality of Evil: each of us is more than capable of just obeying orders.

All these things are descriptions of what evil looks like. In these terms, they are not wrong, but they all beg the questions: where does it come from, what purpose does it serve and why does it exist?

I could go on. I’m not interested in proving to anyone that I have read (or even understood) what they all said. My only point is that enlightenment is not to be found from all that reading.

Our modern version of evil - which doesn’t rule out other, older, causes - is, for me, something that sometimes happens when we get to the top of our mountains and find nothing there. I am struck by the biographies of rock stars, political leaders and life’s lottery winners who experience nothing but terror when they achieve their ambitions and dreams and then realise that they were looking in the wrong place.

Of course, not everyone reaches those mountain tops and turns to the dark side. But it does happen. Particularly when mountains of cash are involved. How much is enough? The answer is occasionally unbounded: ‘More’. Greed is a terrible thing. When our brains are wired for both greed and narcissism the results are billionaires who want to become trillionaires and warmongering Presidents who demand Nobel Peace prizes.

But here I have just described aspects of evil. I’ve not said, or asked, where does it come from?

Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is, rightly, criticised for its oversimplification and cultural specificity. Poor people can make wonderful artists; you don’t need, necessarily, to be well-housed, well-fed or rich before you become interested in ‘self-actualisation’. But like many a simplification, it is a good rule of thumb. Too many of us have absolutely no idea what self-actualisation really means; we have no road map that leads us to it.

In a recent FT column, Janan Ganesh hints at what I am getting at here. He is not talking about evil, at all, but more about the anomie that results when we no longer are busy enough to still our overthinking minds (my emphasis added).

Keynes said people would work 15 hours a week … and that so much leisure would constitute a new test for us. He failed to see that we would choose to consume more rather than work less…With all those liberated hours, perhaps people will throw themselves into intellectual self-cultivation and companionship…we have the evidence from several decades in which leisure has been spreading. We did not all become Montaigne. Some became paranoid, or just over-political. Anyone with parents who worked all hours…will know that what kept them balanced was literally not having the time to reflect on things… To have lots of “executive time”, without going astray, takes a certain kind of temperament… I instruct you to keep up the grind. A gaping diary is a dangerous thing.

Push Ganesh’s thinking a bit further and you will find evil. Nobody has a bigger ‘gaping diary’ than a billionaire, successful hedge fund manager or dictator-President. That diary must be filled with something. You can make another billion, bomb a foreign country, oppress somebody or coercively control your spouse. Or be a decent human being – but have we forgotten how to do that? Or even define what it means?

In Western culture, the discovery that God doesn’t exist led the Victorians to search, desperately at times, for an alternative. An example of that search was the Bloomsbury group’s affection for the philosophy of G E Moore. That led them to love, friendship, connection and art. What’s not to like about that? But the clue is in the framing: the loss of God. Something must replace him once you realise he is dead. Just like AJ and Nitch. Albeit in more flowery language.

The message that Keynes, Strachey, Moore and others took – eagerly - from Moore is that life’s purpose is mostly aesthetic. Keynes once wrote:

Our prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these, love came a long way first.

Robert Skidelsky, in his biography of Keynes, described the Bloomsbury Group’s translation of Moore into lived practice: art, friendship and conversation are the values to live by.

That may not be to everyone’s taste. My own view? At least they made a conscious effort to decide on what is genuinely good, after they had decided that God is dead.

I think that the biggest things in our lives are the connections we make with others. Martin Buber had a lot to say about this, and I think he was right.

All real living is meeting. All actual life is an encounter.

Evil for too many people flows directly from the death of God. Everyone is free to do what they want. Simple really. Maybe Hobbes was right after all.

The existentialists, particularly Sartre, nailed it when they told us that each of us must seize the agency that the universe has given us. Like the Bloomsburys, we must make our own meaning; decide for ourselves what is right or wrong. And that, for so many of us, is terrifying. Creating our own meaning is just too hard. The existentialists gave us our freedom but not, it seems, the means to achieve it.

All of the competing explanations for evil are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But, for those of us who have all of our material needs more than satisfied, many of today’s evils are the direct result of disappearing into our heads and then making fundamentally bad decisions. The small moral compromises that we begin with, sooner or later become the banality of evil.

The disappearance of God from our lives has left a gaping void which, despite all those angels dancing on heads of pins, all that philosophising, we struggle to fill. Keynes and other members of the Bloomsbury group found answers that were conscious choices about what constitutes the good life. At the very least, they were a valiant effort to deny evil.

The Bloomsbury answer came about because they had the mental equipment - perhaps moral backbone - to decide for themselves. Too many of us don’t have access to these tools. We are not equipped to make good choices.

Evil’s unexplained existence tells us something profound. I think it tells us that the militant atheists could, in at least one sense, be wrong. The denial of God’s existence has real costs - often very large ones.

Dawkins, Hitchens, Fry et al have convinced many of us that God doesn’t exist. But none of these superb minds have fully reckoned with the moral consequences of their beliefs. Those intellectuals no doubt can reach conclusions that carry echoes of the ones that Keynes and others suggested. But the Enlightenment wasn’t a free lunch. The atheists won the argument but rendered too many people unmoored - and the rest of us must pick up the tab.

All those Enlightened minds wrote books and pamphlets that persuaded us of the death of God. Modern God-free intellectuals can be viewed on YouTube, pulverising their debating counterparts, the dwindling numbers of believers, at the Oxford Union. While all the Godless free thinkers have their values and beliefs about the good life, we rarely get to see them living that life - that’s wholly understandable: private lives are private.

But that means we get to hear half the message. ‘God is dead’ is broadcast at full volume, while any suggested replacement can be heard only sotto voce. The message that is heard loud and clear is destructive. The constructive one, the good life, is private and quiet. We have a transmission problem.

The atheists took something away - maybe quite rightly - but didn’t suggest a replacement for the absence of meaning. It’s a peculiar human need. It’s not obvious that any other species writes books like Frankl’s classic ‘Man’s search for meaning’. As far as I know, we are the only species that wanders around this planet enveloped in existential angst.

Socrates urged us to lead examined lives, but even he didn’t really face up to the practical consequences of that choice. Yes, Socrates himself lived well. But how many of us have the intellectual and emotional equipment necessary to understand the choices we must make, let alone the ability to make them?

Why do so many of us fail to provide our own scaffolding? Perhaps it is just too hard and, like me, we merely retain something - a shadow - of the framework provided by our childhood brushes with religion. We may no longer be church going, but we have a clear sense that the ‘be kind to each other’ and ‘do unto others…’ teachings of our half-forgotten scriptures are, at the very least, both pragmatic and a reasonable moral code. And then we get busy with being busy to avoid thinking too much about it.

After all, it’s obvious, isn’t it? How to live the good life that is. Well, no actually. Not if you think about it hard enough. Too much thinking can lead us down some very dark tunnels. The Bloomsbury group - and so many others, including all those philosophers - give us their answers, but who is to say that they are the right ones? Everything is relative, there are no absolutes. Except, perhaps, evil.

Social media is the modern way of living without examination. Is social media evil? It certainly is corrupting. The loudest and nastiest voices have voices and platforms that previous monsters could only dream about. What would Genghis Khan have done with Facebook?

Historically, there have been plenty of other ways to live mindless, unintentional lives. But they all end up in the same place.

When there is no stable framework of meaning - that’s the failure of philosophy, in my book at least - the bill can be a big one. It includes a US President free to threaten, without consequence, a whole civilisation with erasure. For Putin to Be Putin. For the richest man in the world, to corrupt everything via social media. For the slaughter to start up again in Europe and just continue, year after a year in the Middle East, Sudan and so many other places.

It’s about mystery. It’s just so weird that the disappearance of meaning just leads to terrible outcomes. The materialist or pragmatist or secular attempts to give us meaning don’t seem to be working very well.

What do I think? Well, Buber, Keynes and the rest were right. Buber, in particular. He said that we find ourselves through meaningful relationships with the world and each other.

When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

Being human is about the encounters, the connections, we make with each other. We know this. Most of us have felt it. The tragedy is that knowing it and being able to act on it are very different things. Too many people lack the scaffolding — the education, the models, the time, the security — to make those connections reliably and well.

That’s the true cost of the transmission problem. The atheists were probably right about God. But they left the constructive half of the message in their private lives, and the rest of us were handed a void with no instructions.

I don’t have a solution. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think that’s where evil lives — not in cartoon villainy, not only in war and genocide, but in the gap between what we know the good life requires and our collective failure to make it happen. That gap is getting wider.

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In relation to taxation:

· Tax receipts of €22.6 billion were collected, which was 4.1 per cent or €979 million lower than last year. When the once-off receipts of the Apple Tax are excluded from 2025, tax revenues were €746 million or 3.4 per cent ahead of the equivalent period in 2025.

· Income tax receipts were 6.1 per cent or €504 million ahead of last year. This is indicative of the ongoing strength and health of the labour market.

· VAT receipts were 5.3 per cent or €403 million ahead of last year. This is indicative of the still-healthy level of consumer spending.

· Excluding the Apple Tax receipts, corporation tax was €95 million or 3.1 per cent lower than in 2025. The first quarter not very significant for corporation tax receipts, so no conclusions can be reached based on the first quarter receipts.

In relation to expenditure:

· Total gross voted expenditure was €1.6 billion or 6.4 per cent ahead of last year. Gross voted current expenditure was €1.4 billion or 6.2 per cent ahead of last year. Gross voted capital expenditure was €0.2 billion or 8 per cent ahead of last year.

The overall Exchequer returns are suggestive of an economy that is still generating considerable tax revenues, and where Government expenditure is still growing strongly. The effects of the Iran war are not yet being reflected in the economy or the Exchequer finances, but the downside risks to growth and tax revenues are likely to become apparent over the coming months. On the expenditure side, the pressure on Government to provide aid (some has already kicked in with the fuel excise duty receipts) will intensify. The disruption to traffic around the country today Tuesday is indicative of the pressures that will come to bear on Government. The blame for the current crisis should be directed at President Trump rather than the Irish government. The response to Covid-19 has created a dangerous precedent, where Government is expected to step in and use taxpayer funds to bail out all and sundry.

The requirement to manage the public finances very carefully is now paramount, given the obvious economic risks ahead.

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