July, 2016

  Will Brexit harm the EU? I guess that remains to be seen.  I feel it certainly has the potential to do so. TTIP is bound to be on hold to see how things play out with the US no 1 ally Britain. If the UK remains united, other EU nations such as Ireland and […]

So here – who speaks for the north? Or Northern Ireland, if you’d prefer that terminology? On the face of it, that seems simple: the people voted into the Assembly  speak for us. But it’s at that point things get tricky. Martin McGuinness told reporters the other day that he spoke for the majority of […]

He said he was from Kentucky ….or was it Louisiana? He talked so much that the details began to run into a minestrone soup of blurred imagery. He was fifty five years old , was the grandfather of a little boy by one of his daughters . He spoiled the little fellow rotten when he […]

  “DEATH AT THE BBC”  was the heading of a “TIME MAGAZINE” piece in 1966, which quoted verbatim parts of BBC radio commentary of a fight in London between  Henry Cooper and Muhammed Ali. Cooper had put up a good fight and floored Ali once, but was beaten.  But the BBC commentary was a scream which had […]

      It is early days and things will get worse before they get better, but change is coming to the UK. What it will be is speculation at this stage, but I imagine individual national sovereignty for Scotland will be inevitable. There is talk of the Bank of England giving up control of […]

I used to teach Ross Hussey’s brother. It was an in-service course for teachers and while he wasn’t the most gleaming intellect in the room, he was a nice man. But then he had the advantage of being from Omagh, probably the finest town in Ireland to be from. But that clear advantage in life […]

  We all know Irish Unionism was founded on sectarian bigotry which has endured for centuries. In face of the prospect of home rule in Ireland where there would be a nationalist majority, the response from Unionism was Carson introducing paramilitaries into Ireland. In face of a clear majority vote for independence in 1918, Unionism […]

Call it the Christy Brown syndrome. Christy Brown, you’ll remember, was a man who was brought up in extreme Dublin poverty with a crippling handicap. Communication with others was virtually impossible until he learned to write with his left foot. And yes, he then wrote a book, later turned into a successful film, called My […]

  As someone who has a fascination with the Second World War, it has always interested me how delicate a game of chess the British ruling class played and won in the context of the European continent. The British, with clever astuteness, knew when to oust Neville Chamberlain and the politics of appeasement, and welcome […]