THE THING ABOUT the Irish is that no matter the context, no matter the occasion, we always like to be the most in-the-know about who’s dead.
It is plausible that in another country, a prominent newspaper group might not really even think about purchasing what is essentially an online archive of real-time death records. But here on this godforsaken island, nothing could make more sense than the Irish Times’ acquisition of RIP.ie this week.
The reminder that RIP.ie is a revenue-generating entity is sort of jarring, like learning that the Naas Ball is actually working undercover for a vulture fund and that Dr Quirkey isn’t just doing it for the sheer love of emporiums. In a press release announcing the acquisition, the Irish Times referred to RIP.ie as a “leading digital death notice platform,” which is the kind of title that most journalists can only aspire to. The company behind RIP.ie was increasingly profitable as of its most recent set of accounts — something which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever whiled away the hours reading about the funeral arrangements of someone we’ve never met.
Who amongst us hasn’t sat back on a Sunday evening and thought about how much easier life would be if we owned RIP.ie? The online obituary portal (it is quite a lot of fun to come up with secondary descriptors for RIP.ie) takes in 60 million views each month. It is a product that has been purpose-built and perfected for the Irish need to know who died when, who they left behind, and on rare occasions, an occasional hint about cause of death.
The Irish Times are now faced with a tough question: how do you improve a product like RIP.ie? A live-updates ticker down the side? Sure, that’s probably not a great name for it, but we’re brainstorming. The Irish Times has at least confirmed that the site will not go behind a paywall following the acquisition, so at least we don’t have a Wordle situation on our hands. That’s not to say further premium features couldn’t be added in the future. Flashboxes, push notifications straight to your phone whenever anyone, anywhere, dies. That kind of thing.
Speaking of death knells, Anglo-Irish relations aren’t exactly at an all-time high, are they? The conversation about immigration in Ireland, already so violently frenzied in some quarters, took another turn this week when Irish politicians, including Tánaiste Micheál Martin and Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, publicly engaged as to whether the United Kingdom’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda will have knock-on effects for migration in Ireland.
WATCH: No ifs, no buts. These flights are going to Rwanda. https://t.co/lrTRFv3d25
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) April 22, 2024
“We cannot have a loophole or a system where we cannot effectively return people,” said McEntee this week, in a statement that did somewhat seem to lose sight of the fact that we are very much still talking about people. Minister McEntee is preparing emergency legislation to subvert an Irish High Court ruling which deemed the UK no longer a safe country to send asylum seekers, following the intention to introduce deportations to Rwanda (no deportation has actually taken place under the scheme so far).
Speaking to the Oireachtas this week, McEntee also said that more than 80% of recent asylum claims were from people who arrived in the state by crossing the border with Northern Ireland, comments which centred Ireland’s common travel agreement with the UK. Micheál Martin later said that this 80% figure was neither “statistical” nor “data-based”, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the middle of a conversation about percentages.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s contribution to the tension was little better, with the Tory leader telling ITV: “We’re not going to accept returns from the EU via Ireland when the EU doesn’t accept returns back to France, where illegal migrants are coming from”.
We hardly expect the UK government to speak about immigration in an empathetic way. They’re the ones who came up with the Rwanda policy in the first place, after all. We could probably not try so hard to stoop to their level of rhetoric, though. A meeting between Helen McEntee and the Home Secretary James Cleverly was cancelled amid the row, with a “diary clash” cited as the reason. And in fairness, that does sound neater and tidier than “both governments are losing their minds trying to look tough on asylum seekers”.
While clashes between protestors and counter-protestors regarding Israel’s war in Gaza have swept across college campuses in the United States, there were parallel protests in Ireland this week. Ties to Israel was one amongst a number of issues protested by Trinity students who took the Book of Kells hostage this week. In a statement issued regarding the Kells blockade, the Students Union also specified “preventing an increase in fees and rent costs for students and obtaining equal rights and fair contracts for postgraduate workers” as reasons for the protests.
Campuses here appear to be less combustible than those in the US, but there have been serious consequences for the TCDSU. The university announced that it would be fining its own SU €214,000 for blocking access to the Book of Kells — an announcement that will surely set the minds of cat burglars across Ireland racing. That’s how much we can get if we hold the Book of Kells for ransom, just for a little while? Why didn’t we think of this sooner?
A spokesperson for Trinity College said: “Trinity has an obligation to protect the Book of Kells, which is a national treasure” — putting a sort of Nicolas Cage spin on the decision to take financial retribution on a bunch of students who are protesting their college’s institutional ties to Israel. Student reporting by Trinity News last year found that as of November 2023, Trinity maintains ties to at least 12 Israeli organisations “through research collaboration and business relationships”.
The enormity of the fine will surely send a signal to students that their institution is panicked, and that their strategy of targeting the Book of Kells is working. If they really want some leverage, though, they should seize control of RIP.ie.
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