Steal a little and they throw you in jail, Steal a lot and they make you king. — Bob Dylan, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ from Infidels (1983) Saturday, 20 January 2018, marked the one-year anniversary of the Trump presidency.  Americans woke up to a federal government in shutdown mode.  Hard core Trump supporters had voted for him to defibrillate the body politic.

In 2016, several UK universities regrettably adopted the use of trigger warnings to signal ‘potentially disturbing’ material on course syllabi.

When I moved from the UK to Ireland in 2015/16 my transition in terms of the availability of television was relatively easy. Given that many of the same channels, subscription packages and streaming services span both the UK and Ireland, it felt more that my television viewing was enhanced by the re-introduction of Irish terrestrial broadcast channels such as RTE 1 &

It’s been over a month since the monumental shock that was Brexit as well as its immediate and messy aftermath of public confusion, political backtracking and the general media frenzy that could hardly keep up with the initial developments and shifting agendas.

The White Paper on the future of the BBC is broadly good news for the organisation, but that’s only because the real damage has already been done. George Osborne’s budget raid cost the organisation £630 million, and led to the closure of BBC3 as a digital broadcast channel amongst other cuts.

The BBC is under threat like never before. That seems to be the consensus about the two events of past weeks: a budget raid by the Chancellor that saddled the BBC with absorbing the £630 million cost of free TV licences for the over-75s, a seemingly hostile charter review process, kicked off with a Green Paper and the appointment of an advisory group by the new culture minister John Whittingdale.