Una Mullally is the anti-Fintan O Toole.
O Toole writing on a topic he knows is awesome, read anything he has written on theatre. Reading his review I know I have seen the same play, but he saw it in much greater complexity than I did, his was a much richer viewing, and he can share that in his review.
However, he often strays into territory where his lack of understanding of the basics leads him into embarrassing errors, in his most recent piece he says that if the West is to win (in Ukraine against Russia) 'it has to commit huge resources into military industries for many decades to come'. Whereas in fact the US has resourced Ukraine to date with less that 5% of US military spending. €50bn over 18 months out of an annual military budget of €750bn. The financial cost of the war in Ukraine is peanuts to the US if it wishes to achieve a generational shift in geopolitics.
If Putin died tomorrow, there’s no chance a democratic peacenik would replace him. The war has reshaped Russian society in ways that make autocracy even more secure
Una Mullally on the other hand writes uninformed drivel on her core topics. She is often accused of being an SF mouth piece, but really all she does is look at the surface of whatever hot topic attracts her attention that week and reflect it through her own narrow worldview. Her prejudices are much more visible than her intellect.
This week however she has a piece on the future of commercial property prices in Dublin. I read it for a laugh, but it is not at all bad. Probably because she recognised that she had no expertise she made an effort to do some research, and the resulting article highlights several relevant factors for the future of the office market. Many finance correspondents have produced worse.
If workers were going to return to offices five days a week they would have done so by now