October, 2015

Picture by tony cairns The charming  English custom of burning Guy Fawkes in effigy for an alleged plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 did not arise from the people’s love of their King and Parliament.  It was a  duty imposed on English people by their rulers and it remained law until 1859.  Had Hitler’s […]

    Picture by Will   Are Unionists capable of commemorating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and engaging with historical narratives which are anathema to their own? Two days ago, events to commemorate the Centenary of the Rising were rolled out, in Belfast City Hall, the location of the signing of the Ulster […]

Picture by Leading Authorities   Four score and seventeen years ago Irish voters dispatched the already terminally- ill  Irish Parliamentary Party of John Redmond  and John Dillon  to its political grave. Three generations later  political grave-robbers,  led by  ex- Taoiseach John Bruton,  seek to clobber those  voters’ descendants with the exhumed  bones of  the  departed Party,  persuade  them that  their ancestors were too stupid to […]

 Picture by Fritz Rambo   Over the past few days, I’ve heard the sentiment expressed, that the Easter Rising was responsible for the eventual partition of Ireland – was it really? There’s no disputing the fact, that the Easter Rising was a momentous event in Irish History. The consequences of the Easter Rising were instrumental […]

Although introduced by Charles Stewart Parnell as someone who was “a household name in Ireland” , Andrew Kettle MP is not recorded in The Dictionary of National Biography, that wonderful collection of lives connected with these islands these past 2,000 years. The DNB a few years back issued a volume -“Missing Persons” which featured some, the significance of whose […]

  Picture by toryscallywag “There’s no more money!” If I had a quid for every time I’ve heard that from unionist politicians in recent months, I’d be a rich man. The repeated statement was usually directed at Sinn Féin, who the unionist politicians believed had added stupidity to stubbornness by refusing to acknowledge what was […]

Picture by jared192 Note: Daniel Collins blogs at  https://danieldcollins.wordpress.com/ As we enter, once more, into the depressingly-inevitable annual period of more-widespread and focused moral outrage reserved for poppy-refusenik James McClean, it is refreshing to encounter a more considered contribution to the debate from a proponent of the Remembrance symbol, as opposed to the usual abusive, outraged, reactionary and knee-jerk bully-boyism […]

Are Unionists capable of commemorating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and engaging with historical narratives anathema to their own? Yesterday, events to commemorate the Centenary of the Rising were rolled out, in Belfast City Hall, the location of the signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912. Tom Hartley, proposed the idea that all […]

  Tom Hartley speaking at yesterday’s launch in Belfast City Hall I got a voice message from the Nolan show this morning, asking me if I’d respond to some remarks Ken Wilkinson has apparently made, that anyone who attends events commemorating the Easter Rising is a traitor. I haven’t heard back from them so maybe they’ve […]

Picture by Jon S   From time to time people tell me I’m a bigot, an apologist for ‘Sinn Féin/IRA’. That of course tells you more about them than me, including the fact that they don’t know what the word ‘apologist’ means. People with this mindset, on the other hand, display a hushed respect for […]