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CMAT takes a pop at former taoiseach Bertie Ahern in new Euro-Country single

CMAT takes a pop at former taoiseach Bertie Ahern in new Euro-Country single

Irish Times16-07-2025
Irish pop star
CMAT
has teased the next single on her forthcoming album Euro-Country, which includes a cut at former taoiseach
Bertie Ahern
over his time in government.
The upcoming album, expected to be CMAT's most political record to date, comes after the singer received rave reviews for her standout performance on
Glastonbury's
Pyramid Stage.
In social posts on Tuesday, CMAT shared a short clip of the single, which shares the same name as the album, along with a snippet of the lyrics:
'All the big boys,
'All the Berties,
'All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me
'I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me...'
The song about the financial crisis in 2008 references the hardships people faced in the area where CMAT grew up.
READ MORE
'I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn't really happen to my family directly,' CMAT said in
a recent interview
.
'My dad had a job in computers, we didn't really have any money, we weren't affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed.
'Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.'
The reference to Ahern in the song is not the first time CMAT has made her feelings known about the former Fianna Fáil politician who served as taoiseach between 1997-2008.
In an interview with
Hot Press in 2023
, she said if Ahern ran for the presidency she would 'make it my personal f**king mission to make sure that he doesn't win'.
Ahern has yet to confirm if he will be running in the presidential election this year, but his name has been included among those speculated to join the race. - Additional reporting from the Guardian
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Wexford councillors oppose Triple Lock amendment as chair goes against his party to cast deciding vote

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The ‘honest belief' defence in rape cases rewards ignorance and insensitivity
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In recent months, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all announced so-called sovereign cloud offerings, designed to keep data and operational control within a specific geography, to reassure their European customers. Microsoft's top legal officer previously told the FT that if necessary, the company would take the US government to court to protect European customers' access to its services, positioning itself as a 'source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility'. Google is rolling out 'air-gapped' solutions – where a client's data does not have to be connected to other networks – and beefing up its sovereign cloud options in the EU. Amazon has introduced new sovereign controls and established independent governance for its European organisation. For Roure, of the CCIA, real sovereignty is more about managing dependencies by expanding free choice. 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But investment is a key stumbling block to achieving those goals. EuroStack argues that investment of €300 billion is needed over the next decade. Other estimates put the amount as high as €5 trillion. Even if the EU could pool public and private financing to boost its digital infrastructure, as officials and researchers have argued it should, that risks taking too much time or not materialising at all. The obvious example of this, cited so frequently it has turned into a cliche, is the Franco-German Gaia-X initiative, a network of linked cloud providers that hoped to challenge US cloud dominance in Europe. For others, the debate has to move away from just the infrastructure. 'What we lack is not chips and data centres,' said Christian Klein, chief executive of Germany's SAP, Europe's biggest software group, on a recent call with reporters. 'We are lacking the people and the talent who can apply AI in the context of what we need in Europe.' Boosting Europe's tech capabilities is also regarded in Brussels as an opportunity to arrest the bloc's economic slowdown. Yen, at Proton, adds that key European sectors such as cars, banking, ecommerce and healthcare are all set to be even more disrupted by tech. For him, the short-term transition costs incurred by moving away from US tech providers are not a cost but 'an investment in the future'. [ Trump keen for US to manufacture iPhones; here's how India is doing it Opens in new window ] Sovereignty provisions can too easily slip into protectionism without delivering outcomes for users or public institutions 'If you don't have the engineers, the talent, the know-how to build this type of stuff here, you're basically screwed for the 21st century,' he says. 'We don't have a chance. Even without Trump, this is something that has to be done.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025 '

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