August, 2016

  The Good Friday Agreement I believe makes a united Ireland inevitable. It is a written international agreement by London and Dublin to implement Irish unification once there is sufficient support for it. That means Britain have already agreed to give up the north and Dublin have agreed to accept it into its jurisdiction. But it is […]

   In his review of Coolacrease (HI 17.2, March/April 2009) Joost Augusteijn attempts to be fair. But he falls into a trap laid by British politicians andjournalists, noted by Edward MacLysaght in his diary for 28 January 1919, exactly one week after the first meeting of Dail Eireann. “In quoting statistics for last year’s general […]

Everything is mystery. There is nothing that is not mystery. That’s the way life is. We live in Mystery, another way of saying we live in the eternal presence of God – and we die in mystery. That’s what good religion tries to capture and teach. That’s what the prophetic words of Jesus recorded in […]

  I love Gilbert and Sullivan. Their tunes are terrific but it’s the absurdity of their plots that gets me every time. I’m listening at the moment  to The Pirates of Penzance, where the hero, although he’s twenty-one, won’t have his twenty-first birthday until he’s in his dotage, because he was born on 29 February. […]

Some people hold great “store” by the labelling of food in their shops and supermarkets. I noticed this myself recently while buying some spuds for dinner. As usual there is a goodly selection to choose from . There are earth apples from Israel, Spain , Ireland and the UK.Lovely white Cyprus potatoes to be simply […]

  Most people have heard of the Manchester Martyrs, Allen, Larkin and O’Brien, who were hanged publicly in Manchester on November 23, 1867 for allegedly taking part in the rescue of two Fenian prisoners during which a police officer was accidentally shot. They were not responsible for the shooting. Not many have heard of Michael […]

Building on peace and a shared future together through reconciliation requires mutual respect, for without it how can there be compromise, an essential ingredient in any recipe for prosperity where there is religious, cultural or social diversity let alone a community that has been polarised through a prolonged period of conflict following decades of discrimination. […]

An article in “An Irishman’s Diary” by Mark Phelan in THE IRISH TIMES on August 25 and a letter arising from it by one Richard Pine yesterday (August 29) are of sufficient interest for  intelligent readers of this blog. Mark Phelan recalled  addresses to the League of Nations by W.T. Cosgrave  and Eoin MacNeill in Geneva in […]

It may not fully live up to Brendan Behan’s dictum that the first item on the agenda of any republican organization is always the split, but it does show how those who’ve worked together can turn away and even become enemies. This morning the news comes that a Sinn Féin councillor and seventeen party activists have quit the […]

If you ever watched THE QUIET MAN and didn’t enjoy it you’ve had a humour by-pass. I’ve heard it dismissed as stage-Irish. It certainly employed some stars of  the Irish stage, such as Arthur Shields, who had stored his rifle under the Abbey Theatre boards before taking part in the 1916 Rising, itself a hard […]