Now that’s interesting .I’ve been listening on the car – radio to a piece about cockroaches.Apparently they are a somewhat smelly little creature, possibly the most primitive insect on earth, originating in tropical or sub -tropical climes and have found our centrally -heated modern homes the perfect environment to colonise and propagate their insect race. […]
November, 2015
A walk on the wild side by Donal Kennedy
A whole month elapsed between the 26 June 1914 murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo and the next shots fired in anger in Europe. Then, on 26 July 1914 Britain’s King’s Own Scottish Borderers shot down unarmed civilians on Dublin’s Bachelor’s Walk, killing four and wounding many more. Nine days […]
Not in our back yard?
When I taught in Canada, one of the novels we studied was To Kill A Mockingbird, about the trial of a black man in the deep South for assaulting a white woman. The book exposed the racism and prejudice that runs so deep in that society and my students frequently expressed their disgust […]
Cumann na nGaedheal and the Irish Times by Donal Kennedy
A few years ago The Irish Times reprinted a Cumann na nGaedheal poster of the 1920s which must have told the world that the party was intellectually and morally bankrupt and reduced to schoolyard bully invective against their Fianna Fail rivals. But the paper’s Political Editor, Stephen Collins thought it was brilliant. The poster was designed like […]
Gay marriage – you’re either for it or against it, right?
The way the Stormont vote was reported was deceptive. The Guardian website had a headline saying in effect ‘NI Assembly votes for gay marriage legislation’; it was only when you got to the body of the piece that you discovered that, er, um, no, the legislation wasn’t really passed, because the DUP, exercising their rights, […]
Some thoughts on Fergal Keane OBE by Donal Kennedy
Picture by Rob Lee Fergal Keane has been garlanded with so many honours one might imagine he’d need a battalion of porters to carry them all but I saw a photograph of him recently taken at Liverpool University where he has been made a Professorial Fellow, flanked by Dame Professor Marianne Elliott OBE who is […]
Enda and the imperilled ATMs
Picture by William Murphy You know the way commentators and sometimes even An Taoiseach himself like to hammer Gerry Adams over his claim that he was not in the IRA? Gerry will raise a Dail question on, say, the number of jobs created in the past year, at which point Enda will come back with a […]
Irishmen who fought in Great War brushed under the carpet. Or were they? – by Donal Kennedy
I’M delighted that Liverpool University has acquired a treasure trove of information relating to Ireland and the Irish in Britain, that is dedicated to the memory of Breandan MacLua, co-founder and editor of the Irish Post. I note that on opening the Library, our Ambassador, Dan Mulhall, suggested that generations before his own were so […]
Feile an Phobail : unbalanced funding?
Picture by Antrim Lens There were a number of public figures indicating shock at the news that Feile An Phobail had received some £500,000 in funding from DCAL over the past two years and had shared some of that money with other, smaller arts groups. The novelist Glenn Patterson said this would “take a lot of people […]