July, 2016

  Marching has a long and and largely dishonourable history in the north of Ireland. In the final decade of the eighteenth century, there were important parades held in Belfast in July; but it wasn’t the Battle of the Boyne they were celebrating, it was the taking of the Bastille in Paris in 1789. This […]

In an era whereby many, if not most, young people in Europe have lost faith in the economy as a means of achieving their ambitions, hopelessness is rife. The failure of most of the political class to listen to and prioritise the needs and aspirations of the young, has led to a general aura of […]

I’ve long suspected that the much-ballyhooed derring-do of Britain’s Special Operations Executive during the 1939-1945  unpleasantness was largely a figment of the imagination and a propaganda production which paled when compared with Laurence Olivier’s HENRY V, filmed in neutral Ireland with Irish Defence Force personnel acting as film extras. The Official History of The S.O.E. was written […]

I’ve just been listening to an interview with British Secretary of State Theresa Villiers on RTÉ. It raised at least two questions in my mind, neither of which was answered. When Ms Villiers was asked when she’d first been made aware of An Taoiseach’s proposal for an all-Ireland forum to deal with the fall-out from […]

No one has really teased out how an entire party…the DUP, for example, including those members in the farming community , decided as one bloc on a “Leave” strategy in the recent Brexit referendum. Did every DUP voter simply vote on the “leave” ticket simply because Arlene the nominal First Minister and some of her […]

   Me neither. Not even in THE IRISH TIMES, which welcomed Hitler’s accession to power in the 1930s, was a ventriloquist’s dummy for British repression in Ireland in 1920 and has reverted to that role in recent decades. Welcoming Hitler, the paper recognised that he was a rough customer but it actually wrote that you […]

  The following snippets are from Robert Harris:  “Late one night in 1917, at the height of the First World War, Winston Churchill beckoned to a fellow Liberal MP to join him for a final look inside the  deserted Commons  chamber….This little room is the shrine of the world’s liberties.”   “Smile at the romantic rhetoric […]

I was surprised to see tens of thousands of people out demonstrating in London last Saturday against Britain’s decision to leave the EU. Not because I don’t think there are tens of thousands of British people who are appalled to the point of tears by what their fellow-countrymen and women have done. No, the surprising […]

“I’m bloody angry. It’s only anger is keeping me from falling into the sea!” That was Neil Kinnock today, expressing his distaste for…Whoa, that’s not right. He fell into the sea at Brighton in 1983, when he was doing a striding-purposefully-with-a-vision thing for the press cameras. No, that should be “It’s only anger is keeping […]