April, 2016

During the 1959 Presidential Election, Fine Gael’s candidate, General Sean MacEoin, was interviewed by the Sunday Independent. MacEoin recalled that he’d been chosen by Minister for Defence Cathal Brugha in 1921 to lead a unit to to London shoot membersof the British Cabinet who were directing a campaign of murder in Ireland. MacEoin said that, as […]

(Eddie Whyte was born, bred and buttered in north Belfast. He now lives in Norway where he is an elected officer on the national executive of the country’s largest trade union.)  Like many others, I was terribly disappointed to read that you had withdrawn from the Council event at Belfast city hall commemorating the Easter […]

‘What’s in a name?’ was the thought provoking title of a piece by Mr Donal Kennedy on this here very blog. If I might answer such an open question I would have to reply ‘a potential Pandora’s box of identity crises’. I have a special shelf dedicated to puncturing the various nationalistic bubbles that many […]

Does John A. Murphy, Emeritus Professor of History of University College Cork, tend to give you a heartburn on your arse? That’s how he affects me with his obsessive hatred of Sinn Fein and his repeated pedantic reminders that Sinn Fein did not organise the 1916 Rising. His long and distinguished study of history does […]

…………………..WOULD SMELL AS SWEET ” as Juliet said to Romeo. But what if your given name was Uranus? This thought arises from a recent TV documentary  where a man, understandably, discontinued answering to his first given name. Nicknames are no longer politically correct though most names must have originated as nicknames. There’s a dispute about […]

In one sense in the silliest of seasons, in another sense we’re in days of deadly seriousness. Silly,  in that some dafts statements and actions have occurred over the past week or so, and deadly serious in that these statements and actions point us towards some very unpalatable realities. To start with the silly stuff. This morning in the Indo […]