Patrick Comerford
This blog reached yet another new peak last night (1 July 2025), totalling up 14 million hits since I first began blogging about 15 years ago, back in 2010.
Yet again, this is yet another humbling statistic and a sobering figure, and once again I am left not with a sense of achievement but with a feeling of gratitude to all who read and support this blog and my writing.
After I began blogging, it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. It was over a year before this figure rose to 1 million by September 2013. It climbed steadily to 2 million, June 2015; 3 million, October 2016; 4 million, November 2019; 5 million, March 2021; 6 million, July 2022; 7 million, 13 August 2023; 8 million, April 2024; and 9 million, October 2024.
But the rise in the number of readers has been phenomenal over the past few months, reaching 9.5 million on 4 January 2025, 10 million over a week later (12 January 2025), 10.5 million two days after that (14 January 2025), 11 million a month later (12 February 2025), 11.5 million a month after that (10 March 2025), 12 million early last month (3 May 2025), 12.5 million a month later (6 June 2025), 13 million less than two weeks later (17 June 2025), 13.5 million a week later (24 June 2025) and 14 million last night (1 July 2025).
Last month (June 2025) was the second month that this blog ever had more than 1 million hits in one single month, with 1,618,488 hits by the end of the month (30 June). This followed January’s record of 1 million hits by the early hours of 14 January, and a total of 1,420,383 by the end of that month (31 January 2025).
In recent months, the daily figures have been overwhelming on occasions. Seven of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog were in June alone, four were in January 2025, and one was in this month (1 July 2025):
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 261,422 (13 January 2025)
• 100,291 (10 January 2025)
• 82,043 (23 June 2025)
• 81,037 (21 June 2025)
• 80,625 (22 June 2025)
• 79,981 (19 June 2025)
• 79,165 (20 June 2025)
• 69,722 (18 June 2025)
• 69,714 (30 June 2025)
• 69,657 (1 July 2025)
This blog has already had 4,466,445 hits in the first half of this year, over 31 per cent of all hits ever.
Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ It may only be a hunch, but it’s an educated hunch or a journalist’s experienced instinct when I say I have not failed to notice some patterns.
Some of these days were in the week before and after Trump’s inauguration, the others were in the days around his damp-squib military parade in Washington DC on 14 June and his hair-brained decision to attack Iran. Indeed, the overwhelming number of hits are not from Ireland, the UK and Greece, as I might expect, but from the US.
It’s not paranoid either to imagine how the bots at work in some ugly, dim basement in Washington are trawling far and wide for anyone critical of the Trump regime. The costs may be minimal, but it’s still money that could be better spent on healthcare, education, rehiring air traffic controllers or reinstating DEI programmes.
I doubt that my criticisms of Trump, Rubio, Vance, Hegseth and Musk are going to make it easy to get a visa to visit the US over the next four years, should I ever want to visit the place under the present dystopian regime. I’d prefer to boost my ego and convince myself that my popularity is growing and that I have become a ‘must-read’ writer for so many people every day. But, sadly, I don’t think that’s so.
On the other hand – and in this lies my greatest fear – if a minor critic of the Trump regime outside the US such as me is feeling watched and intimidated at this level, try to imagine how many critics inside of the Trump regime and ICE inside the US feel they really are being monitored, intimidated and bullied into silence.
Putting all this aside, with this latest landmark figure of 14 million hits by today, 1,618,488 hits in June alone, and over 1.4 million hits in January, I once again find myself asking questions such as:
• What do 14 million people look like?
• Where do we find 14 million people?
• What does £14 million, €14 million or $14 million mean.
• What would it buy?
The film 14 Million Screams is so-called because 14 million young girls are forced to be married every year, and 700 million women have been married before the age of 15.
Several cities have populations of around 14 million people, including Istanbul, Karachi, Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Shanghai and Cairo … although this figure depends on how specific metropolitan areas are defined, and who is doing the counting.
A sculpture of a kouros, an athletic youth, and valued at $14 million was among the antiquities recently returned to Greece after being stolen and illegally sent to the US. Dozens of stolen antiquities were repatriated to Greece including 47 antiquities seized from the collection of billionaire investor Michael Steinhardt in 2021 after a search that lasted many years across many countries.
Greece’s efforts to manage the challenges posed by the tourism industry, with extensive taxes and regulations targeting holiday homes, seem to have fallen short. Despite hefty fines and additional charges imposed by the government, the number of residential properties surged by nearly 10 per cent last year.
Figures show there were 14 million overnight stays by foreign tourists using short-term rentals like Airbnb for their holiday accommodation last year (2024), an increase of 2 million on the previous year (2023, prior to Greece implementing policies to address issues caused by over-tourism, such as sky-rocketing rents and deteriorating public services.
The Syrian crisis is one of the largest displacement crises globally. Since 2011, more than 14 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety. This includes both internally displaced people and refugees who have crossed borders.
The director-general of the International Organisation for Migration, Amy Pope, said last October that over 14 million people had also fled their homes in Sudan, either inside the country or over its borders. They include the 11 million people who have been internally displaced within the country, and the 3.1 million who have crossed borders.
As the frontline shifts and hostilities increase, more than 14 million Ukrainians are estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance in the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War I. Over 6.3 million refugees have fled to neighbouring countries and 3.7 million people are internally displaced. This means nearly one-third of the population of Ukraine has been forced to flee their homes, including more than half of all Ukrainian children.
Up to 14 million UK tourists risk being turned away at airport gates, according to a recent report. Only half of recent British visitors to Europe knew that a passport must be issued less than 10 years before departure ,and only one in three British passport holders knew that a passport must be valid for at least three months after the return date.
This means around 13.9 million travellers could have made one of these mistakes on their trip. The report also found that only two in five UK adults do not knew they are not be covered by their insurance policy if they make one of these passport errors.
The way statistics like this are mangled in the red-top tabloids never ceases to irritate me. When any of those 14 million tourists are turned back from the their planned package holiday in Benidorm, the Balearics or Benitses, it becomes the fault not of Brexit but of some faceless European bureaucrats in Brussels.
Those forgetful tourists are never bemoaned as illegal migrants without legal papers. But when any miniscule proportion of those 14 million displaced people or refugees – from, say, Sudan, Syria or Ukraine – try to cross the channel, they become illegal migrants without papers, and the victims of tabloid bile and racist caricature.
When any of those 14 million passport holders go island hopping in Greece, it’s fun and pleasure – it ought to be; when any of those 14 people use boats between France and the English coast, they became the target of vitriol from the likes of Daily Mail columnists and Reform voters.
The world has a population of 8.2 billion people, and 14 million people represent only 0.17% of all those people. So 14 million hits on this blog is quite a modest number, I have to concede.
One of the most warming figures personally in the midst of all these statistics is the one that shows my morning prayer diary reaches an average of 80-85 people each day in the past month. It is over three years now since I retired from active parish ministry. But I think many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches averaged or totalled 560 to to 580 people a week.
Today, I am very grateful to all 14 million readers of this blog to date, and for the small and faithful core group among you who join me in prayer, reading and reflection each morning.
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