While we can anticipate hearing much more about the provision of new health and welfare services — as the mood music increases in tempo the nearer we come to a general election — it was good to see the TD for Wicklow provide a forthright defence of migrant workers employed in our hospitals and care homes.

After several weeks juggling numbers, Mr Donnelly was able to provide some figures that should hold the attention of everyone.

Every hospital in Ireland, he said, would have to close if migrants were sent home, as demanded by those who rioted and protested in Dublin.

A total of 65 nationalities work at one of the hospitals where the victims of last Thursday’s stabbings were treated, the minister added.

Mr Donnelly acknowledged “the extraordinary work done by our healthcare workers, over the last few days, in response to the horrific attacks on three children and their carer”. He also praised their unstinting efforts to care for those who were injured during the protests and riots.

The minister, who met teams from the emergency and intensive care units at Temple Street Children’s Hospital and the Mater Hospital in Dublin, said international staff were shaken by the rioting and worried about leaving their hospitals. Several were harassed on their way home.

This behaviour is both disgusting and criminal, but it is neither novel, nor surprising.

Back in February, our health correspondent and political editor were reporting on a string of racist attacks on nurses — which were described by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar as a “new low”.

His comments came in the same week as an Oireachtas committee heard that medical staff were afraid to go to work, with one children’s emergency department nurse detailing personal experience of parents spitting at her, throwing objects, and threatening to stab her.

During a private meeting, the head of the Irish Nursing and Midwives Organisation (INMO), Phil Ní Sheaghdha, had told Mr Varadkar of several complaints from foreign national members subjected to ongoing racist verbal aggression.

Nearly 6,000 assaults on nurses and midwives took place between January 2021 and October 2022 in public hospitals, and it will be scandalous if the next set of figures do not show an improvement in behaviour.

The health committee was told last winter: “We depend on a lot of non-Irish doctors to support our healthcare system.

“We would be absolutely lost without them.”

We should not need another reality check. If Ireland does not want these essential workers, or to provide a welcome to others, then there are plenty of other nations that will. If we cannot keep them safe, then there will be severe consequences.

When history becomes a moveable feast

December 2. It’s a date on which important things happened. It was 81 years ago that we entered the Atomic Age when the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi activated the first nuclear chain reaction under a sports stand at Stagg Field in Chicago. You may remember the scene from this year’s blockbuster movie Oppenheimer.

It was also the date on which Enron went bust in 2001 after an energy crisis that blacked out parts of California, the fifth largest economy in the world. You may remember the details from the documentary film The Smartest Guys in the Room.

One of the most viewed programmes on Netflix right now is The Railway Men, which tells the story of the gas leak from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, the capital city of Madhya Pradesh in India. The incident claimed the lives of up to 20,000 people and left 500,000 survivors, many of them blinded, with chronic ailments.

The link between these diverse events, as with the new series of The Crown  and the blockbuster Napoleon, is that historical episodes are reinterpreted and reimagined for our collective entertainment. And this, as we witness from Gallic fury over the Bonaparte epic, can conflict with something which everyone seems to cherish these days — their “truth”.

Critics say that Le Petit Caporal didn’t take part in cavalry charges, shoot cannonballs at the Pyramids, nor attend the execution of Marie-Antoinette. Nor did he meet that well-known Dubliner, the duke of Wellington. 

He’s portrayed as an expansionist of Hitlerian ambitions while his supporters celebrate him as a father of the Enlightenment who altered France and Europe for the better, introduced a new and lasting code of laws, and who championed civil liberties at a time when they were given scant regard.

The director of Napoleon, the much-lauded Ridley Scott, who learned his trade in the advertising business, has a view when challenged over historical accuracy (“How do they know? Were they there? Tell that to your fucking historians.”) People fretting should “get a life”, he told the New Yorker.

Does truth really matter? In a current revival of Oh What A Lovely War  on the London stage, Irish troops are portrayed step dancing towards enemy trenches during the Battle of the Somme. Fact check. This never happened. It’s a dramatic device.

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Ever since Homer opened his account of the Trojan War, the Iliad, with the line “Sing muse of the wrath of Achilles”, writers have tried to find a way to explain big events through the portrayal of individual stories. The latest portrayal of Napoleon may be more convincing than the character represented in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure but it requires no less of a suspension of disbelief. To seek historical certainty requires wider reading and a healthy scepticism. Unless entertainment is your goal. And if it is, there’s nothing wrong with that.

A scene in Napoleon  depicts his tactical masterpiece, the Battle of Austerlitz, after which the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger said: “Roll up that map of Europe; it will not be wanted these 10 years.” 

That was 218 years ago, in 1805. On this day, December 2. That is a fact you can rely on.

Unloved carbon-emitting SUVs

The divided loyalties over the attractions of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and their impact on our ability to keep our environmental pledges is a problem that shows no sign of going away anytime soon.

Two out of three vehicles sold here last year were SUVs, 13 percentage points higher than the EU average and greater, as a percentage of total new cars sold, than France, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

Experts calculated that if SUVs were a country, they would be the sixth-largest emitter of carbon in the world and noted that cars are now 300kg heavier than they were at the beginning of the century.

Some campaigners demand that higher parking fees are levied upon them. In the UK, in a landmark decision, the advertising watchdog has banned two Toyota ads for condoning driving that disregards its environmental impact.

It says the campaign had been created without “a sense of responsibility to society”. Data show 18% of all SUVs registered this year have been electric, and that electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and hybrids had a combined market share of car sales for the first six months of 44%.

Environment and Transport Minister Eamon Ryan says the Government will “go back and look at the tax issue” next October. This is a cautious response in the weekend that Cop28 opened and is likely to please neither side. Owners of SUVs will take more comfort from it.