23-06-2025
Irish Examiner view: Will we ever learn from history?
In a little over a month, we will mark the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb by the Americans on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, destroying it and killing 100,000 of its citizens.
It was August 6, 1945, when the B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the bomb.
Just nine days previously, then US president Harry Truman, speaking in Potsdam in conquered Germany, warned Japan to either surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction'.
Japan did not surrender and Truman kept his promise.
The president's words came eerily to mind last weekend when the current holder of the office demanded pretty much the same thing of Iran.
When Tehran failed to comply, a phalanx of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers was dispatched by the White House to strike at Iran's nascent nuclear capability.
The two events, although 80 years apart, were both unexpected and had dramatically altered the course of a conflict that had been going on for years.
In the case of Japan, the Hiroshima raid presaged the dropping of a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later and capitulation followed.
With Iran launching missiles at US bases in Qatar last night, we are on an increasingly unpredictable path with no clear idea of how it might end.
Whether or not that will provoke Trump's Oval Office into using its nuclear weaponry remains to be seen.
Humankind, we know, learns little from history, but the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have kept us in fear of our darker impulses for each and every one of the 80 years since.
Although both Russia and North Korea have explicitly threatened tactical nuclear strikes, and there are nine countries with nuclear weapons (including Iran's rival Israel, which has a policy of neither confirming nor denying it), nobody has used an atomic weapon in anger since 1945.
That a war has broken out over widespread concern of Iran's nuclear capability raises fears of an unprecedented global nuclear holocaust once more, and potentially puts our Earth and it peoples in grave jeopardy.
History has many lessons to teach us.
Will we listen?
Challenges for the pub trade
There was a time when being an Irish publican was regarded as one of the most solid and profitable jobs in the country.
While times change and occupations evolve, the Irish pub trade is going through a sea change few would have ever predicted, having hit an economic black spot.
Soberingly, property experts in Cork reckon that, of the 50 pubs for sale in the city and country, roughly 20% are non-viable as pubs because of location, ageing, and demographics.
The disappearance hugely popular city bars such as the Swan and Cygnet, Nancy Spains, and The Western Star — as well as the recent closure of The Evergreen in Turner's Cross — have highlighted how great the generational span in the trade has become.
Villages and towns across the county — not to mention countrywide — are witnessing a similar trend. Amid a nationwide housing crisis, it is perhaps no surprise that so many traditional watering holes are now being transitioned into residential buildings.
Things certainly ain't what they used to be.
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Scandal in Spain
While there has been little focus on Spain in recent days for obvious reasons, the country's socialist government is locked in a battle for survival and its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has seen his reputation as a scourge of corruption shredded.
The EU's last centre-left leader is fighting for his political life as events over the past seven days have intensified a national argument that has been ongoing for nearly 12 months about his, and his party's, suitability for government.
The dapper 53-year-old and his Spanish Socialist Worker's party (PSOE), who lead the country's minority government, are fighting allegations of grift and corruption. Sánchez's right-hand man, Santos Cerdán, resigned last week after a supreme court judge found 'firm evidence' linking him to kickbacks from public construction contracts.
Cerdán, who is also the organisational secretary of the PSOE, is linked with two men — former transport minister José Luis Ábalos and his former aide Koldo García — who were involved in a 2021 scandal involving taking payment for facilitating mask contracts during the covid crisis.
Both denied any wrongdoing, but the legacy of the scandal has dogged Sánchez since. The situation worsened last week when leaked evidence handed to the Guardia Civil's anti-corruption unit purported to show Cerdán discussing illegal payments with Ábalos and García, as well as the merits of certain sex workers.
If this wasn't bad enough for Sánchez and his government, grift allegations against his wife, Begoña Gómez, and brother, David Sánchez, are also being investigated.
The prime minister has dismissed the allegations as a 'fit-up' driven by the far-right groups behind them.
Like all senior politicians, Sánchez will be used to the hurly-burly of life in high office, but it appears he is slowly being swamped and if his partners in government, a cabal of small Catalan and Basque nationalist parties, were to decide he and his party are too toxic, the show might be over.
Sadly, there is a growing sense that the days of what was once lauded as one of Europe's last beacons of social democracy may be coming to an ignominious conclusion.
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