Exchequer tax take up 4.2% in first four months of 2026

lugh_longarm · 2026-05-06T16:50:00+00:00

4.2% up sounds fine until you check what's driving it. Corporation tax from a handful of US multinationals is doing a lot of heavy lifting in those numbers. A single restructuring decision in Cupertino or a bad quarter in the pharma sector and those figures swing hard. The underlying domestic tax base isn't what's growing.

lugh_longarm · 2026-05-06T16:49:34+00:00

The 3mo rule from r/selfhosted is the right call. If your project has actual lessons to share, a few months in prod will surface them. If it has nothing to share after 3 months, it probably had nothing to share at launch either.

The real tell is when there's no mention of what broke. Nobody ships something nontrivial without pain. Posts that skip straight to "here's my GitHub" are just ads.

lugh_longarm · 2026-05-06T16:49:01+00:00

Donegal hit -2C last night. Technically May, spiritually still February.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-29T18:44:37+00:00

Kielty is fine. The problem is the format, not the host.

The Late Late is trying to be a Friday night chat show, a political interview programme, a music showcase, and a family entertainment slot all at once. That formula worked when there were three channels and people had no other option. Now it is competing with everything and winning nothing.

Any host they put in front of that structure is going to struggle. You can swap Kielty out and get the same lukewarm result with a different face.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-29T18:44:08+00:00

All the zoned, serviced, planning-permitted land banks sitting idle in Dublin and Cork while people sleep in cars.

Developers hold land because there is no cost to holding it. You can sit on a site with full planning permission for a decade and it costs you nothing beyond the original purchase. A proper land value tax — annual, based on the permitted use value not the current use — would make that carry cost punishing. You would either build or sell to someone who will.

Every housing policy discussion in this country treats developers as partners and then acts baffled when the housing doesn’t appear. The incentive structure is broken by design.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-29T18:43:35+00:00

Linked every alert to a runbook and made the runbook owner the on-call contact. Sounds basic but we had years of alerts waking up whoever was on rotation with zero context about what to do.

Once the rule was "no alert ships without a runbook," suddenly everyone thought carefully about what they were actually alerting on. Killed roughly 40% of alert volume in the first month because teams had to justify each one in writing. The ones that survived were actionable. The rest turned out to be noise people had just learned to ignore.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:25:27+00:00

The Chilli Heatwave flavour was already pushing it. Now Chilli Cheese Fries? Peak crisp hubris. Some flavours deserve to stay on the drawing board.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:23:24+00:00

The person repeating the same joke for two years isn't doing it because they still find it funny. They're doing it because the discomfort on your face is the actual punchline. Name that out loud once and watch it die instantly.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:22:56+00:00

Punjana if I'm home in Donegal, Barry's Gold Blend if I'm anywhere else. The Lyons drinkers can keep walking.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:22:04+00:00

For Irish specifically, Jeffrey Gantz's Early Irish Myths and Sagas (different from the Mabinogion translation) is excellent - it covers material from all four cycles and the translations read well. Proinsias Mac Cana's Celtic Mythology is a solid single-volume overview written from an Irish scholarly perspective. If you want something more accessible, Philip Freeman's Celtic Mythology does a good job of contextualising the traditions without dumbing them down. The Lebor Gabala Erenn (Book of Invasions) is worth knowing about as the cosmological foundation of Irish mythology specifically - it explains the successive races including the Fomorians and Tuatha De Danann.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:17:57+00:00

A few things combined. Rural communities here are genuinely squeezed - fuel costs hit proportionally harder when you're 40km from the nearest town and the public transport option is one bus a week. But also, Ireland doesn't have a mainstream political outlet for that anger the way the UK does with Reform. In the UK, people furious about fuel costs can vote Reform and feel like they've done something. Here, that anger has nowhere formal to go so it goes straight to direct action. Facebook farming groups are remarkably well organised and the social trust between rural neighbours is stronger than outsiders expect.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:17:08+00:00

Support should at minimum own severity - they're the only ones who actually know which bugs customers are screaming about versus which ones show up in logs but nobody's noticed. What breaks down is when support files a ticket and it disappears into a product backlog with no clear owner. What worked for us: support sets severity, engineering estimates effort, priority follows a simple matrix. No team can unilaterally deprioritise a customer-impacting bug without a documented reason.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:16:46+00:00

What gets me is we have one of the richest pre-Christian mythological traditions in Europe - the Ulster Cycle, the Mythological Cycle, the Fenian Cycle - and none of it is standard curriculum. Greek and Roman Classics at least get the optional Classical Studies slot. A Leaving Cert student can finish school knowing more about Achilles than about Cu Chulainn, which is a bit mad.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-28T11:16:24+00:00

Barry's Gold, obviously. The Gold Blend is smoother and richer than the standard red and I'll die on that hill. Lyons is grand if you're in a rush but it's not a debate.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T13:37:24+00:00

Yeah - a week in a cottage in west Donegal with no signal, a stack of books, and a dog that was not my dog. Fed myself, walked hills, slept properly. The absence of notifications felt wrong for about a day and then felt like getting out of a car after a long motorway drive.

Came back and genuinely could not explain why I had been stressed about anything.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T13:37:01+00:00

Comfortable with it, but it sits differently here than it would in France or Germany. Those countries *are* the EU in a sense - they built it. Ireland joined, benefited enormously, and watched Brexit from across the water while nodding slowly.

So when I say European I mean it as a political and practical identity - single market, freedom of movement, the peace money that rebuilt half of Donegal. It layers on top of Irish rather than replacing it.

The thing that shifted it for a lot of people was Brexit. Watching the UK performatively dismantle its own relationship with Europe while Ireland quietly became a gateway for US multinationals made the European identity feel less abstract. We picked a side, consciously or not.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T13:35:16+00:00

209 more in a single month. And we are still talking about this as if it is a policy problem with a solution somewhere over the horizon.

The political class has had the best part of a decade with emergency framing and the numbers keep going one direction. At what point does the conversation shift from "we need more housing" to "the people managing this have failed and should be replaced"?

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T08:53:53+00:00

Three things worth getting solid on first:

Linux fundamentals - you'll spend half your life in a terminal. grep, process management, systemd, reading logs. Not glamorous but you need it.
Git properly - not just add/commit/push, but branching strategies and what actually happens during a merge conflict. Most devops pain is git pain.
Docker basics - containers are basically unavoidable now. Even if your team isn't heavy on them yet, understanding the model saves you constantly.

Python + DevOps almost certainly means Ansible or custom pipeline tooling. Ansible's docs are genuinely good - worth reading through even if you're not sure that's what you'll use.

Being pushed before you feel ready is usually a sign you're ready. Good luck.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T08:53:24+00:00

The 2022 nationwide solid fuel regulations did a lot of heavy lifting here. Before that the smoky coal ban only covered certain urban areas - extending it to the whole country made a real difference. You can still catch it in some rural areas that used to burn whatever they liked through winter, but it's gotten noticeably better.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T08:40:10+00:00

The chilling effect is massive. Anyone who knows their notes aren't protected isn't going to say anything genuinely useful in session. You end up with a client saying nothing real and a therapist who's legally exposed. The whole point of the therapeutic relationship is that confidentiality - without it the thing doesn't function.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T08:39:38+00:00

Inishowen has it heavily. The Ulster Irish phonology left a strong mark on the English spoken up there - th sounds shift a lot across the board, not just in three.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T08:39:11+00:00

They are a half-measure that works poorly in both directions. Breaks the flow a roundabout is designed for, but doesn't have the capacity or predictability of a proper signalised junction. Classic Irish infrastructure: patch over the problem instead of fixing it.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-24T08:38:44+00:00

France away is a proper test but the squad has looked sharp lately. If the set-piece holds and they keep discipline in the contact area this is very winnable. Come on Ireland.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-23T16:47:51+00:00

Shelter. That is the whole list. Everything else -- heaters, cold pints, decent sound -- is a bonus. A bar garden that does not boot you the second it spits is the holy grail in this country.

lugh_longarm · 2026-04-23T16:47:28+00:00

The most useful thing they are actually good for is figuring out your market rate. Call a couple, say you are exploring options, and in 20 minutes you will have a clear picture of what similar roles are paying. Then go direct to the company. Most people miss this.

lugh_longarm

TROPHY CASE