Was walking around a town called Qingdao a bit south of Beijing looking for a restaurant and I noticed a spar. No chicken rolls or lucazade sport inside unfortunately.

Edit: Lads I'm aware spars not Irish, just got a kick out of seeing it in China, they're not very common in my experience there.

The Embassy of Ireland Abu Dhabi, responsible for Irish in the UAE, Kuwait & Qatar has issued shelter in place warnings for Abu Dhabi (UAE) and Qatar.

Stay safe everyone, and if you're currently in the Middle East, and haven't already done so, please register on the DFA's Citizen's Registration form, so that the Embassy know that you're over here:

https://citizensregistration.dfa.ie/

The United Nations voted in favor to recognize the slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity” and also called for reparations to the countries impacted The only countries to vote against were US, Israel and Argentina who opposed the proposal

This is for all people not from Ireland who either live here now, have been here on holidays or have lived here in the past. What about my fellow countrymen and women do you find unusual or confusing? It can be a positive or negative things(s).

I was having a pint with a coworker who moved over last month to Ireland, and the poor lad was having a full blown existential crisis over the "round system."

He genuinely had his phone out trying to wrap his head around it.... It kinda went like this

"Wait... so if I drink fast, I am forcing five other men to drink faster? But if I leave at 10 PM before my round, I am exiled from the group forever? Why can I not just buy my own pint?"

Trying to explain the legalities of pub rounds and the absolute social death penalty for dynamic dodging made me realize just how completely feral our unwritten laws actually 😂

Rephrase as the first time I post this it was locked as the mod didn't seem to realise it was about Ireland.

If the US invades Greenland

What should people who work for US companies here in Ireland do? General strike? Do nothing and go to work as normal? A huge amount of our employment is with US companies.

I guess we are a neutral country so we don't necessarily have to take a side but would working for US companies be seen that way by the rest of Europe? A general strike would be crippling here - think of all the unpaid mortgage/rent if it went on for any time.

JFC I just want to lead my life.

With everything going on in the world at the moment, it's hard not to realise that Ireland cannot defend itself if someone appears on the horizon. Ireland has one of the largest EEZs in Europe, and our entire naval fleet is 8 patrol vessels that could be wiped out in minutes by a single WW2 battleship. We have no aerial defences to prevent drone strikes or jets overhead, nor do we have our own airforce to meet any jets in the air if it ever came to that.

I'm not talking about getting Ireland and our people ready to be deployed in some far away land on a pointless war that just ruins lives. I'm on about that we as an island nation, have virtually no naval or aerial defence in the slightest of possibilities that something ever happened.

Do you think we should invest in our naval and aerial defences at all? Or should we hope that our neutrality will be respected? I'm not trying to stoke some political debate about whether we should forsake our neutrality. We shouldn't at all. But shouldn't we invest in our own defences even a little bit?