Serious Citizen feed

New Year celebration with environmental responsibility and sustainable development.

Ireland ranks 9th in the Environmental Performance Index, indicating serious challenges in achieving our environmental goals. The most dangerous pollutants of groundwater in Ireland are nitrates from fertilizer use on land and microbial contamination from septic tanks and spreading of slurry.

Irish Rail’s long-awaited Dart+ West expansion is set to move forward after legal challenges from two local businesses were officially withdrawn, allowing the €1 billion project to proceed.

DUBLIN – The Irish government has announced how it plans to deploy the €14 billion recovered from Apple in back taxes, marking a significant boost to the country’s long-term infrastructure strategy.

Ireland has introduced a striking new weapon in the fight against gambling harm: a voluntary card-blocking tool that allows customers to disable all gambling payments from their debit cards. Under the scheme, “customers will be able to instantly disable gambling payments with a simple ‘switch’ function,” a move launched by the Irish Banking Culture Board in concert with AIB, Bank of Ireland, and PTSB.

When machines begin to speak louder than people, a nation risks losing its voice. Ireland stands on that threshold today. In a country where words were once passed down by the fireside, algorithms now learn in place of storytellers. The digital revolution, which once promised freedom and knowledge, has brought a new kind of threat — the disappearance of the very language in which Ireland once dreamed, loved, and sang. Now, in the era of artificial intelligence, the country faces a question that resonates far beyond its borders: can culture survive in a world where even memory is data?

If you watch European roads long enough, an unmistakable truth emerges: the newest, most refined Mercedes models are rarely driven by young men. Instead, they belong to men who have crossed into their mid-fifties, men who carry an air of stability and lived-through experience. The numbers confirm this quiet observation. According to 2025 data from S&P Global Mobility, the average premium-car buyer in Europe is about 54, while the typical Mercedes buyer approaches 55–56. By the time he finally steps inside the car he once admired as a young man, he has already spent decades building stability rather than tasting freedom. A Mercedes has become a symbol of maturity. But in today’s economic landscape, it no longer has to be a symbol of late maturity.

There comes a moment in a man’s thirties or early forties when the world around him hasn’t changed—yet everything inside him has. It’s not a crisis, not a collapse, not a reinvention. It’s a recalibration. After years spent proving, achieving, pushing and absorbing, a man finally asks himself whether the life he’s living is actually his, or just the one he learned to endure.

The mobile gaming world is experiencing a revival that no one predicted with such force: the triumphant return of MapleStory, Habbo, RuneScape, Dofus Touch and a whole constellation of titles once considered relics of early internet culture. What should have stayed as fond memories in dusty forums has instead become a contemporary digital movement. The industry’s newest stars are the games that shaped the adolescence of millions of players now aged 25 to 40 — and their comeback is not driven by nostalgia alone. It reflects a deeper cultural shift, one in which emotional memory, platform accessibility, TikTok virality and generational identity converge at precisely the right moment.

By 2026, it is no longer accurate to say that gambling is “under pressure.”
 The pressure phase is over. What we are witnessing now is a structural reset.