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Dr John Coulter ✍ Northern Ireland has a superb record of producing top standup comedians and one name leading the field is Shane Todd.


During a holiday to visit a relative in England, I had the pleasure of seeing Shane in action in Newcastle city centre’s famous The Stand Comedy Club. It was a packed gig and we had seats right at the front.

Shane was brilliant and his one-liners had the audience in constant stitches for over an hour as he talked about his life’s experiences.

For me to say that Shane is top of the heap when it comes to Ulster comedians who have made a name for themselves in Ireland and the rest of the UK might seem slightly biased. But I am.

This is because Shane used to be one of my journalism students on the Higher National Diploma in Broadcast Journalism at what is now Belfast Metropolitan College’s Millfield Campus.

This wasn’t yesterday; it was several years ago, but even then I had an inkling that Shane was destined for a glittering career in standup comedy.

Even as a journalism student, I knew him to be the master of the one-liners. His time on our journalist training programme also coincided with a particularly challenging time in my life with my severely autistic son.

There were mornings when I arrived at Millfield after a long night with my son that I just wanted to cry. But being a lecturer in journalism means that you can’t drag your problems into the classroom.

Shane was to become a psychological crutch. I knew his love for standup comedy, so on the really bad days, I’d say to Shane before lectures began - ‘tell me a joke!’ And he would - and suddenly the day would be much, much brighter.

I have followed Shane’s career since he left the college to pursue a calling in standup comedy rather than investigative journalism - maybe that says more about my lecturing capabilities that one of my most memorable students I’ve had the privilege of teaching went into comedy rather than the media!

So what is the secret of Shane’s gripping appeal? It’s simple - he can take everyday issues which face us as an audience and turn them into a laugh a minute routine.

Many modern day standup comedians rely on the shock tactics of a host of expletives and bad language to amuse their audiences. Not Shane Todd. He has a natural story telling ability to communicate his gags with the minimum of swearing. His routine comes across as a conversation about life that constantly holds your attention; he has you hanging on every word.

I’m not suggesting Shane will get booked as the warm up act for this year’s Belfast General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, but his routines have the ability to generate a family atmosphere at his gigs.

Leading comedians like Jimmy Carr and Neil Delamere have perfected the art of interacting with their audiences. But what’s unique about Shane is that he’s able to hold the audience in the palm of his hand. The microphone becomes almost like a magic wand.

The audiences listen intently to him. He is the pied piper of comedy, and the audience members are his eager followers.

The pace of the routine is not quick fire, but he gently leads you through the story dropping in the one-liners, but all the time the audience remains gripped on every sentence.

The fact that there was a queue outside The Stand an hour before the gig kicked off is testament to Shane’s pulling power as a master of the standup routine. The Stand is one of the top comedy clubs not just in Tyneside, but across England as a whole.

The fact that Shane had it packed on a damp Sunday evening is also testament to his sheer professionalism. The photo with this column has Shane in the middle along with myself on the right and my eldest son, Daniel, on the left pictured inside The Stand comedy club.

Shane’s pulling power is almost hypnotic. There was no heckling from the audience during his gig.

In terms of standup strategies, while Jimmy Carr uses the ‘heckle amnesty’ to encourage banter from the audience, and Neil Delamere uses the ‘front row roasting’ to boost their routines, Shane uses his hypnotic presence on stage to maintain the interest of his audience. What you see, is what you get - a great night’s craic.

And just as he used to leave me in stitches when he was my student with his instant one-liners, so too, I left that comedy club very well satisfied that I’d had a great evening’s entertainment. I also left feeling very proud of the fact that I can boast - I taught Shane Todd!

But I still wonder what advice Shane would give me for my bucket list plan to heckle Jimmy Carr!
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Shane Todd Is Terrific Tonic For A Night’s Craic!

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Forty

 

A Morning Thought @ 3115

Louth For Ever ★ How a Fuel Price Spike Became a Fascist Audition.

“RIP Ireland” — Photography:
Brendan Donnelly

There is a particular tell, when a “spontaneous people’s protest” isn’t quite what it claims to be. It isn’t the placards. It isn’t the high-vis vests. It isn’t even the tractors. Ireland has plenty of legitimate reasons to bring a tractor to town, and a country built on agricultural grievance has every right to express it loudly. The tell is something subtler. It’s the moment someone in the crowd, their face contorted with what is supposed to be anger about diesel, screams “What’s a woman?” at a passing TD.

That happened on O’Connell Street this week. The TD was Paul Murphy. The heckler, by Murphy’s own admission afterwards, was a known far-right agitator. The question, imported wholesale from American culture-war X/Twitter, with no organic relationship whatsoever to the price of a litre of diesel in County Meath, is the entire story of what these “fuel protests” actually are, compressed into three syllables shouted on a Dublin street. People genuinely furious about the cost of heating their homes do not, in unscripted moments of rage, reach for gender-critical talking points. They reach for the cost of heating their homes.

What we have been watching this week is not a fuel protest. It is a blockade. And the blockade is the message.

The Word Matters

Let’s start with the language, because the language is doing political work. A protest persuades. A protest occupies a public square, marches down a public street, gathers outside a parliament, and asks the country to look. A blockade does something else entirely. A blockade puts a small mobilised minority in a logistics chokepoint and squeezes until the rest of the country is forced to negotiate at gunpoint with whoever happens to be holding the chokepoint that morning. One is democratic. The other is the precise opposite of democratic, it is the substitution of leverage for argument, of coercion for persuasion, of “we have the diesel and you do not” for “we have the better case.”

It matters which word we use, because the word “protest” carries a century of legitimacy earned by people who marched and were beaten and were jailed and went on hunger strike for the right to be heard. To paste that word onto a tow-truck convoy organised by a man who thinks asylum seekers get free trips to the zoo is to launder a coercive tactic in the moral inheritance of a democratic one. It is, frankly, theft.

And the country has, this week, been held to ransom.

The Parasites and the Host

Here is the part that requires care, because it is the part the bad-faith reader will pretend you didn’t write. There are real hauliers in this. There are real farmers in this. There are real agricultural contractors whose margins were already paper-thin and who watched the price of red diesel spike in the wake of the US and Israeli war on Iran and who concluded, not unreasonably, that something had to give. Their grievance is legitimate. Their anger is legitimate. The cost-of-living crisis is real, the government’s response to it has been thin, and a country in which a working person cannot afford to fuel the vehicle they need to work is a country with a problem that politics is meant to solve.

None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is who organised the WhatsApp groups.

The forensic work has been done by The Journal, and it deserves to be read carefully by anyone tempted to wave this away as “ordinary people venting.” The Facebook page that led the early mobilisation — The People of Ireland Against Fuel Prices — was set up in 2021 under a different name and ran a paid advertisement urging attendance at this week’s events. The ad was paid for by a company called TheTowTruck.ie, owned by a man named Sonny Boyd, who has used his personal Facebook page to claim, falsely, that Ireland is the only country in Europe to give immigrants free housing, weekly cash payments, free English lessons, and free trips to the zoo and theme parks. This is not an incidental detail. This is who paid for the advertising that brought people to the chokepoints.

The three men put forward as media spokespeople: James Geoghegan, Christopher Duffy and John Dallon, have between them appeared in livestreams with Niall McConnell of Síol na hÉireann and with Philip Dwyer, the anti-immigration agitator who was, in one of the more telling moments of the week, ejected from organising WhatsApp groups by genuine fuel protesters who told him in plain terms that the protests were “about fuel.” Christopher Duffy’s social media history includes a comment, posted under an item about Greta Thunberg, that he could not “care less if she got raped or beaten” and made “no apologies for saying that.” This is the man who has been addressing the national press from O’Connell Street as the spokesperson for what we are being asked to call a fuel protest.

And then there is the moment the mask slipped entirely. On Tuesday morning, from the back of a truck on O’Connell Street, Kildare county councillor Tom McDonnell, the same Tom McDonnell who became briefly notorious last year for saying Irish women need to “breed” more, addressed the crowd. He told them Ireland was being “destroyed” by Europe and by the government. And then, in a single sentence that ought to be carved into the lintel of every honest analysis of this week, he told them where the missing fuel-tax money should come from: empty the IPAS centres.

That is the entire economic argument of the blockade resolving, in real time, mid-speech, into the scapegoating of asylum seekers. Two and a half billion euro. From IPAS centres. To hauliers. From the back of a truck. The mathematics are not the point. The mathematics have never been the point. The mathematics are a delivery mechanism for the politics, and the politics are that someone else, someone browner, someone newer, someone with less power than anyone in that crowd, should be made to pay.

That is not a fuel protest. That is a fascist audition with a diesel-soaked script.

The Swarm

For the first few days, the international far right barely noticed Ireland. Tommy Robinson was elsewhere. Katie Hopkins was elsewhere. Ezra Levant, the Canadian impresario who has spent years monetising other people’s grievances on camera, was elsewhere. Conor McGregor — found civilly liable by the High Court of sexually assaulting Nikita Hand, and now reinventing himself as a political actor after his failed presidential bid — was, by the standards of his recent output, almost quiet.

That changed on Thursday morning. Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan asked the Defence Forces for assistance in moving vehicles from roads and fuel depots, and within hours the swarm arrived. Robinson posted footage of army vehicles, vehicles which, the Defence Forces had to clarify, were on the streets for an entirely separate reason, and announced that the Irish government was “now at war with the Irish people.” Hopkins re-shared old anti-immigrant protest footage as if it were live. Levant flew in. McGregor offered to feed the protesters at his pub, then posted videos of his workers handing out sandwiches on O’Connell Street, and declared it was “amazing” that Dublin was now safe, a reference to the fiction, which he has spent years cultivating, that the capital is dangerous because of immigration.

The misinformation followed immediately, because misinformation is what these accounts produce: AI-generated images of Gardaí using water cannons that did not exist; old footage of sulkies racing down O’Connell Street recycled as if it were Tuesday; a video of an army vehicle trapped under a railway bridge that was not even filmed in Ireland. Former far-right electoral candidate Derek Blighe announced that “children as young as 12” had been pepper-sprayed by “regime forces” at the Whitegate oil refinery. Regime forces. Read that phrase again and ask yourself which political vocabulary it belongs to, and which it does not.

This is the European far right’s most successful tactic of the last decade, and it has now been deployed in Ireland with textbook precision. Find a real economic grievance. Build a blockade around it. Wait for the international content economy to arrive. Wait for the legitimate complainants to either leave or be drowned out. Convert the resulting footage into recruitment material. The gilets jaunes did this in France. The Dutch farmer convoys did it. Ottawa did it. The fact that it is being done here, on our streets, in our names, with our diesel, is not an accident. It is a method.

The Murphy Problem

Which brings us, with no pleasure at all, to Paul Murphy TD.

Murphy walked onto O’Connell Street earlier this week. He was met with chants of “shame on you.” Someone screamed “what’s a woman?” at him. He was told he does not stand with working-class people. He was forced — physically, on camera — to turn around and leave. And speaking to The Journal afterwards, Murphy acknowledged, in plain language, that the people who had screamed at him were all known to him, all known far-right agitators in Dublin. And then he said the left should not abandon the protest.

This is not a small mistake. This is the trap the European populist left has walked into, again and again, over the last decade, and it should be possible by now — it should be required by now — for any serious left politician to recognise the shape of the trap before stepping into it. Nobody is asking Paul Murphy to abandon his constituents in Dublin South-West. Nobody is asking him to be quiet about fuel poverty, or about a government that has been culpably absent on the cost of living, or about the obscenity of a war driving up the price of a working person’s commute. He could be saying all of those things from a thousand other platforms. He has chosen to say them from this one, and the choice of platform is the choice that matters.

Look at who got this right. Ivana Bacik TD called for the blockades to end while explicitly recognising the right to protest and the distress driving it. The Social Democrats said it was wrong to block roads and critical infrastructure while urging the government to engage. And Roderic O’Gorman TD — Roderic O’Gorman, the Green Party leader whose face has been used in homophobic memes shared by figures now embedded in this very protest — pointed out, in one of the most clear-eyed political statements of the week, that protesters should be directing their energy at the US and Israeli embassies for causing the energy crisis with their attack on Iran.

Read that again. The politician the blockaders’ organisers have spent years smearing is the one naming the actual cause of their fuel bills. Meanwhile the People Before Profit TD is explaining why he won’t abandon the people who screamed “what’s a woman” at him on a public street. Something has gone badly wrong with the political compass when O’Gorman is offering the cleanest left analysis on offer and Murphy is reaching for the megaphone next to the coffin marked RIP Ireland.

And it is not only Murphy. Sinn Féin’s positioning here deserves to be named, because honesty is the only thing that makes the rest of this argument hold. Of all the parties in the Dáil, Sinn Féin should be the first, not the last, to recognise the parasites-and-host pattern. A movement whose entire history was built on insisting that real political grievances must not be conflated with the people who attach themselves to those grievances for their own ends ought to be incapable of misreading what is happening on O’Connell Street this week. The decision to back the blockades, chasing votes that, in all likelihood, will not arrive at the ballot box anyway, is not an ideological misstep. It is a failure of the precise pattern-recognition the party’s own century is supposed to have trained into it. The undecided middle that any serious unity project depends on is not won by standing next to Tom McDonnell while he calls for IPAS centres to be emptied. It is lost there.

What This Was

Strip away the high-vis, strip away the diesel fumes, strip away the carefully filmed sandwich distribution, and what was this week, really? It was a stress test. It was the international far right discovering that the same playbook that worked in Paris and Ottawa and Eindhoven works just as well in Cork and Dublin. It was an audition — for the cameras, for the donors, for the next mobilisation, and for the one after that. The fuel was the pretext. The blockade was the rehearsal. The country was the stage.

The hauliers will go home. The diesel will eventually be cheaper or it won’t. The IPAS centres will not be emptied because the IPAS centres were never the point — they were the test of how easily the idea of emptying them could be smuggled into a crowd that came for something else. And the answer, this week, was: easily enough. Easily enough that a Kildare councillor said it out loud from the back of a truck and nobody walked away.

That is the thing to remember when the convoys disperse and the cameras leave and the columnists move on. The blockade is the message. And the message has been received, by the people who sent it, by the people who answered it, and, one hopes, by the rest of us, who still have a country to defend from the polite fiction that any of this was ever about the price of a litre of diesel.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

The Blockade Is The Message

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work. 

Coloured pencils on packaging

⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Belfast From Highfield

Gowain McKenna ✍ It is the second of week of April 2026 and we are well into the mass fuel protests taking place across Ireland. 

By and large protestors represent the back-bone of Irish society, hard working farmers and other workers whose very survival depends on reasonable fuel and energy costs. 

Yet, there are also many supporters and other participants who are involved by mere fact of moral responsibility to the Irish people and way of life. For it is these very people who are the lifeblood and soul of the Nation, and that keep the country running while the cabal in Leinster house plot and scheme to the detriment of the Irish working class.

The reality is these fuel protests did not just happen off the cuff, but rather are the result of a growing mass discontent and disillusionment that by now has been simmering for months or even years. For make no mistake these protests are not just about fuel prices, but are also a response to many disastrous decisions on behalf of a government embedded firmly in neoliberalism and corporatism. 

It is therefore fitting that by preventing access to major fuel depots and ports the protestors are now hitting the government exactly where it hurts. Perhaps now the FF/FG coalition will understand the hardship of the Irish working class who in many instances are living hand to mouth and from paycheck to paycheck amidst one poorly managed crisis after another. There has to be a tipping point somewhere along the line and perhaps this is it. 

The government is also quick to play the used and worn Far Right card in a feeble attempt to divide and discredit. But let us call it what it is, a workers led revolt that brings with it clear potential for revolutionary change. And whether or not those involved lean to the Left or Right is totally irrelevant because economic turmoil and genuine hardship impacts us all.

By now the FF/FG cabal in Leinster house are so out of touch with the typical Irish citizen it is frankly disturbing. Indeed, on the second day of unrest Taoiseach Martin was publicly scathing of protesters while showing zero understanding into why Irish citizens were taking such measures. Instead he made it abundantly clear that his sympathies align solely with big business, the elites and corporate interests who God forbid might be short of footfall.

The Irish government could attempt to deal and alleviate this in another way, perhaps by acknowledging the strike with a view to negotiation on strike demands, or by taking simple steps to further reduce or halt tax revenue per litre of fuel or heating oil. Yet the reality is such steps are an anathema to those only invested in self-interest and pursuits for personal gain.

It is an unfortunate side effect that such protests will bring about temporary fuel shortages for the people at local filling stations and forecourt's, but on the whole it is a short term sacrifice in the pursuit of holding the government accountable, and to send a message to invoke much needed change of government policy and direction.

Alarmingly, like something from the fascist playbook of Pinochet, Franco or Mussolini, the Irish government has now began to mobilize the Irish Army to quell and put a stop to the 'blockades' of motorways and key fuel depots across the country. 

If this measure is to go ahead it would be a grave mistake on behalf of the State. It would set a most dangerous precedent and be a clear indicator that there are two very distinct societal constructs living side by side in Ireland: the oppressed and the oppressors. Or to put it another way, those who defend Irish people and interests, and those who do not. Finally, the last word should be left to Liam Mellows when he said:

It is a fallacy to believe that a Republic of any kind can be won through the shackled Free State. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The Free State is British created and serves British Imperialist interests. It is the buffer erected between British Capitalism and the Irish Republic - Liam Mellows

⏩ Gowain McKenna is a Belfast born engineer and musician. He has an M.Phil, MS.c and B.Eng in Aerospace Engineering, but has somehow found himself working in the marine industry in Co. Donegal Ireland, the place from which he now calls home. Visit his website.

Irish Fuel Protests 🪶 Not Just About The Fuel!

The Journal ★ Written by Stephen McDermott.

Our FactCheck editor details the internet trends seen by a thirty-something-year-old man.


It Started With an image posted to a far-right Facebook page.

I spotted it while I was scrolling early on Saturday afternoon: a map of Ireland with six red dots in a ring outside Dublin, and a caption in block capitals that read “National fuel protest assembly points Tuesday 7am”.

Soon I saw others share the same map, or AI slop pictures of trucks with the same details about assembly points for Tuesday morning, almost exclusively on pages that usually share far-right and anti-immigrant content.

Plans for a protest had, of course, been building in the days beforehand, but the images were my first glimpse into this online callout for people to go to Dublin.

They appeared in my feed because of the types of pages I monitor for work, but their reach extended far beyond those spaces over the course of the weekend.

It’s never easy to tell how big these things will be from early on, though it quickly became clear from my social media feeds that the protest was underway virtually – even though roads and motorways were clear.

Continue @ The Journal.

The Internet's Bad Actors Quickly Distorted The Fuel Protests Into A Narrative Divorced From Reality

Friendly Atheist ★ Two Minnesota cases expose how clergy power dynamics—and victim-blaming tactics—are colliding with secular law.

Last year, a Catholic priest from the St. Cloud Diocese in Minnesota was charged with “sexually abusing, physically assaulting and threatening a woman to whom he had given spiritual guidance.” A woman said Father Joseph Herzing had counseled her over a period of several years beginning in 2018, and that relationship soon turned sexual… and violent.

Setting aside the horrific details of the allegations, Herzing was a priest. He was supposed to be celibate. He was in a position of power over a woman he was guiding. Even if everything had been consensual—and the allegations said they were not—it would have been unethical and potentially criminal.

Last year, a different Catholic priest from the St. Cloud Diocese in Minnesota was also charged with sexually abusing a woman. A woman accused Father Aaron Kuhn of assaulting her repeatedly over the course of three years when he was providing her with spiritual advice.

According to the complaint, the victim told police that Kuhn used his role as a spiritual advisor to manipulate her and pressure her into sex. 

Continue @ Friendly Atheist.

Catholic Priests Say Charging Them With Sexual Abuse Violates Their Religious Freedom

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Kyle Mantyla.

Recently, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and unabashed Trump cultist Lance Wallnau spoke at a church where he gushed that, thanks to the Trump administration, Christian ministries and non-profit organizations are being flooded with government grants to carry out charitable and social welfare work, which Wallnau said they can use to "disciple people up to the point where they're receptive to the gospel of salvation."

"There's billions [of dollars] right now that are on the table for a transfer of wealth into the Kingdom of God, if we can hold on to the government to be able to access it," Wallnau declared.

As such, Wallnau added, it is imperative for churches to mobilize their congregations to vote in the midterm elections to ensure that Democrats don't turn off the spigot.

"Donald Trump only has two more years he could be in office, and in November, he could have his whole momentum blocked because most Christians don't even know that there's a midterm thing," Wallnau warned. "What happens in midterms—in the middle of your term— is the other party can organize better than you and take away all your power."

Continue @ RWW.

Lance Wallnau Hails Trump As 'An Actual Old Testament Prophet King'

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Thirty Nine

 

Pastords @ 39

 

A Morning Thought @ 3114

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