July, 2016

Yesterday in the House of Commons, MPs voted by a huge majority to renew the Trident nuclear programme. We could argue all day about how much it’ll cost: some say as little as £30 billion (yes I know, Virginia), others as high as £150 billion. The cost, however, is not my main concern right now. […]

Abe Lee Birham is a man who is obviously capable of detached judgement about himself: “I know personally that I have blood on my hands. All of us who made them have blood on our hands”. The ‘them’ he refers to is the bullets he and his co-workers make in a factory in Winchester, Mississippi. […]

  Madam, IN BED WITH THE MILITARY  (This letter arose from the publication in the IRISH TIMES  of dispatches from Afghanistan by an Irishman, Lieutenant Patrick Bury -serving in the British Army. The British Army was well served by them – but was the paper’s readership?) Has it occurred to other readers that public servants […]

  In this space on July 10 I suggested that Britain’s much-ballyhooed SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE was a propaganda outfit which posed no military threat to Germany, and was less of a morale-booster for British forces and population than the 1944 film Henry V directed by Laurence Olivier and filmed in neutral Ireland with the cooperation of […]

Dear Fintan, In the spirit of our age of critical awareness and analysis, as championed by our president, Michael D Higgins, I invite you to fully engage in a discussion on of the role of Bobby Sands in history. I had hoped that you would kickstart this discussion after the screening of the documentary “66 […]

Redundancy payments to Cameron’s political aides, as he left Downing St., are a glaring example of the chasm between the rights of most workers and those of the extremely rich. Before packing Samantha and   the children off to their new £17m, you scratch my back, freebie home in Holland Park , the out-going Prime Minister […]

I’ve led a sheltered life so the name of Tommy McNulty, while probably on your lips at least twice a day, is new to me. I discovered this morning that he is originally from Tyrone (what part, I wonder?) and according to today’s Sindo, is the chairman of “a Cavan Sinn Féin cumann”.  The Sindo’s Jim Cusack devotes […]

God help me, readers but I have an addiction. It’s reading the letters pages in the Irish Times. There’s AMADAIN ANONYMOUS and OINSIGH WITH OVARIES, a Birdbrain from Canary Wharf parroting nonsense – I suspect he’s what the Cockneys call a Merchant Banker, and a small core of contributors who analyse questions before venturing their […]

The voices of those expressing regret at the departure of  Theresa Villiers had barely died down before the chorus of good wishes to new-comer James Brokenshire welled up and began to fill the air. Will the new Secretary of State make much difference? Hard to say. There are people who grow into jobs and James B […]

  Now that THE IRISH TIMES is firmly entrenched in Dublin’s Tara Street wouldn’t it be a good idea to rename that Street “Herr Hitler’s Way?.” The paper never echoed the Harp that Once In Tara’s Halls nor even the lone Harper in Thomas Moore’s  song whose faithful harp praised Ireland. Except for the years when […]