I’m in Sicily at the moment for a short holiday. It’s beautifully sunny, the people are friendly, prices reasonable – and yet I’m slightly disappointed. Where are the sheep with the bells attached to their necks, where are the clouds of dust rising from mountain tracks, where is Michael Corleone? Isn’t Sicily supposed to be […]
September, 2013
Pots, kettles and bombs
Dr Richard Haass, a former senior State Department official under Republican presidents who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, told reporters on Monday that cruise missile strikes on “anything associated with Syrian chemical weapons capabilities, storage depots or potentially the troops that are believed to be associated with their use” are most likely. Additionally, […]
Time for the DUP to know that actions have consequences
Why did Peter Robinson, and him in Florida, send a letter that threatens the very existence of the Stormont institutions? Maybe it was being too long out in the Florida sun. Or maybe there’s a clue in something he said earlier this year: “One of the elements of leadership that is always important is to […]
Conall packs it in
And so farewell, Conal McDevitt MLA – or should that be ‘Slan go foill’ – G’bye for now? In retrospect it seems inevitable that he had to walk the plank, but there were moments after that payments-to-his-wife’s-company thing broke, I thought he’d manage to tough it out. Or brazen it out, if you’ d prefer […]
About not getting it
One of the most revealing statements of a summer full of revealing statements was that by DUP councillor William Humphrey. He said that the Lord Mayor would not have been attacked at Woodvale if he’d listened to them. How so? Because he said people in Woodvale would not tolerate a visit from someone who’d been […]
Would you like a good smack?
I once smacked my daughter. She was the first of our four children and she’d done something I told her not to, so I smacked her. She howled, her mother appeared and comforted her, and I exited feeling like a bullying brute. That was the first and last time I struck any of my children […]
A man without malice
It’s funny the way one death can eclipse another. On 22 November 1963, Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis both died. That same day John F Kennedy was assassinated. Most people remember not just the day of Kennedy’s death but what they were doing at the time. Few could tell you when Huxley or Lewis […]