neil o’toole

Wicklow man living in Cork

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@paddycosgrave https://t.co/OguanSylaL

[@jon_bayle @jon_bayle]

Why is Government information still so fragmented across reports, PDFs, portals and departments and almost inaccessible to taxpayers..?

We should build an open-source Irish public-sector LLM so taxpayers can query / access government information in one place

Presumably something that could be advanced by the OGCIO - Office of the Government Chief Information Officer - given its role within the Department of Public Expenditure

[DaveOCKOP @DaveOCKOP]

We spent over £400M last summer but it feels like this summer we've more work to do than ever.

If Alisson leaves, we really need to consider if we are prepared long term. We've no energy in midfield and lack creativity from full backs that we had before.

Most worrying is the side don't seem to be giving it their all, simple as that. We can't even concentrate correctly, allowing opposition players run free, take free shots and go unopposed for goal scoring moments.

That performance is giving me Stoke 2015 vibes, as mentioned.

We can sign every player in the world but if we won't make that hard run, close that player in time, show enough aggression we can forget about it.

[neil o’toole @notoole]

Two of the foundations of the GAA channel must be

1 - Free-to-air (FTA)
2 - Airtime is strictly allocated on the basis of 50% female sports & 50% male sports

History in the making

[TippBackThatAFact @c_backpocket]

He’s on the money here.

And people who don’t like negative talk in the GAA can go do one - what are you defending?

The ‘get over it’ approach allows it to continue.

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@adrianweckler

[Dan O'Brien @danobrien20]

Ireland has the fifth highest marginal income tax rate in the OECD for workers on the average wage. Almost half of every extra euro earned after just €44,000 is taken by the by the government. These confiscatory rates, which were introduced 18 years ago to address a fiscal crisis that is long over, crush the incentive to work more.

Ireland is the red bar in the OECD chart below.

https://t.co/TfCn9maAOL

[Parth Jadhav @ParthJadhav8]

Devs, Think about this when adding Push notifications to your apps

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@AerLingus 29 days and still waiting @AerLingus

[neil o’toole @notoole]

20 days later still nothing from @AerLingus. Zero follow-up. How hard is it to send a reset password email?!?

[neil o’toole @notoole]

3 weeks from May and snow on the mountains in Killarney @CarlowWeather

[Idrees Ali @idreesali114]

The latest Economist cover says it all.

[Dan O'Brien @danobrien20]

Ireland's personal taxation regime is the second worst among 38 peer countries according to the Tax Foundation. High marginal taxes (paid at very modest thresholds) have been in place since 2008. There has been almost no improvement over two decades despite having the resources to do so - a relentless rise in government expenditure has been prioritised year after year.

A simple example illustrates how bad it is. The average electrician or plumber working for construction company will be on the top marginal rate, whereby the state takes more of every additional euro than the person gets to keep. If he/she wants to earn self employed income, the government will take more than the worker, and a tax return will have to be filed, involving time and/or accountancy fees.

Is it any wonder finding tradespeople is hard?

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

Nothing is quite as European as demanding that your emergency WW3 meeting must only occur during normal office hours.

[neil o’toole @notoole]

What is it with @clubber so zoomed in for camogie matches? Zoom out a bit will ye - Tks!

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@elonmusk Some sort of FSD in Ireland (Europe) would be nice

[McKinsey & Company @McKinsey]

$247B.

That’s how much the Magnificent Seven contributed to global economic profit over the past four years, an 840% surge since the mid-2000s.

Their scale and profitability continue to set the pace for business worldwide. Explore more: https://t.co/4a92nTtaXP

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@DavidGillick Get a set of AirPods for live translations - sorted

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@coachshanerice Speed

[neil o’toole @notoole]

@coachshanerice @threadreaderapp unroll