the U.S. military's use of Shannon Airport, among many other issues. In 2006, he spent six months reporting for The Irish Times in China. His former editor, Geraldine Kennedy, was paid more than the editor of the UK's top non-tabloid newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, which has a circulation about nine times that of The Irish Times. Later, O'Toole told a rival Irish paper, the Sunday Independent: We as a paper are not shy of preaching about corporate pay and fat cats but with this, there is a sense of excess. Some of the sums mentioned are disturbing. This is not an attack on Ms Kennedy, it is an attack on the executive level of pay. There is double-standard of seeking more job cuts while paying these vast salaries. In June 2012, O'Toole compared the Irish Constitutional Convention to the American Citizens Union, a reformist political organisation that the New York City political machine Tammany Hall did not bother suppressing so long as it did not threaten its hegemony. In August 2019, after the selection of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, O'Toole proposed to get Parliament to back an alternative Cabinet who would push back the October deadline for Brexit to allow a trade deal to be negotiated. The proposal required seven Sinn Féin MPs in northern Irish border constituencies to resign in favour of a pact between the four largest anti-Brexit parties in Ireland, thereby triggering by-elections at a certain date in mid-September. O’Toole believed they would result in a more hardline anti-Brexit parliamentary faction that would make a stronger case for a no-confidence vote in Johnson. The proposal received sharp criticism from Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who claimed the existing anti-Brexit factions in Parliament were strong enough without the party making too many policy concessions. A 26 June 2018 column in The Irish Times by O'Toole examined how the Trump administration's policies, as well as public-facing communications concerning immigration and asylum-seekers from Mexico, might be deliberately calculated to bring elements of fascism to the world's leading democracy. An April 2020 column in The Irish Times asserted that the destruction of the public image and reputation of the United States by Donald Trump culminated with his bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and that subsequently pity was the only appropriate feeling for the American people, the majority of whom had not voted for him.