June, 2014

A NOSFERATU FOR THE NEW AGE by Harry McAvinchey

My late mother would have called Jimmy Savile “an odd crature”. Even back in the the day when “Wee Mick” and the rest of the Stones would have been on Top of the Pops around 1964/1965. She always loved the excitement we all shared with the craziness of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones social, […]

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THE GARDEN  by Harry McAvinchey

  I love this. Bending down on my hunkers picking a few strawberries and raspberries  for  the porridge bowl. This time of year. June. This time of morning too .That  wide-open stillness. Not too much background noise. The birds fighting and yippering in the bushes.  Nagging each other.I noticed two young thrushes yesterday fighting over […]

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The past: we’ve had one-eye teachers

 “Propaganda is a soft weapon: hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake,and strike the other way” –  Jean Anouilh One of the most successful propaganda feats – at least until recently – was to insert in the national and international consciousness the belief that our Troubles were the […]

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AFTER THE STORM by Harry McAvinchey

  It is a curiousity how the brain edits the electrical storm that crosses  the many floors of the mind. Lightning flashing while synapses blast and turmoil , ripping changes across dimensions and oceans of shardy, tarnished memories. I’m in a bar sometime in the late 1950s or possibly the very first or second year […]

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Are the Craigavon Two our contemporary Gerry Conlon?

My old ex-schoolmate Eamonn McCann had an interesting piece in the Irish Times yesterday. He was talking about the Gerry Conlon case and how, at that time, most Irish journalists kept their heads down and their mouths shut. To have done otherwise would have been seen by many as tantamount to saying you supported the […]

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Martin McGuinness, Her Maj and Crumlin Road jail

I was looking at that photograph the other day of Queen Elizabeth walking through Crumlin Road jail with  Peter Robinson on one side, Martin McGuinness on the other, and was that Theresa Villiers peeping smiling from behind? I can see why Robinson and Villiers were there: she’s their monarch and head of state,  they go all […]

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