September, 2016

Lesson 1: how to talk properly about the Long Kesh 1983 escape

A few blogs back I made the point that some unionist politicians appear to think they have the right to decide on who leads or speaks for nationalists/republicans. This naturally leads them into difficulties, since they’ve accepted Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister and nationalists/republicans just keep on insisting that they choose their own leaders.  In short, […]

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THE SINN FÉIN RABBI by Donal Kennedy

Browsing in a secondhand bookshop I took up the memoirs of Chaim Herzog (1918-1997) , the Irish-born Sixth President of Israel. I’d known that his father had been Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, but not that he often hosted Eamon de Valera in his Dublin home. His father, Yitzhag HaLevi Herzog, was born in Poland in 1888 and […]

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FASCISM IN IRELAND by Donal Kennedy

In 1934 a Dublin man was given the accolade of  “leader of the first Fascist Movement in Europe.” That same year another Dublin man made the prediction that “as the Blackshirts had triumphed in Italy and the Hitler-shirts in Germany, so, assuredly would the Blueshirts be victorious in the Irish Free State.” The first Dubliner […]

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‘The BBC and ‘Londonderry’ by Joe McVeigh

I have had a serious problem with the BBC for many years. It began many years ago, about 1987, when a BBC Religious producer invited me to take part in a series he was producing on BBCTV about the subject of ‘violence’. He was to have four different people talk .The only other one I […]

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A Bradley Wiggins Monday morning

There are not many statements you can make with absolute certainty, but one such this morning is that Sir Bradley Wiggins is not a happy man. Wiggins’s main appeal lay in his ability to collect gold medals – three in the Athens Olympics, two in the Beijing Olympics, and then there was that little matter of […]

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‘The BBC is wrong: There is the suggestion that Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky have broken the Rules’ by Sammy McNally

In the fallout of the release of the medical records of thousands of sports people, by the Russian hacking group the Fancy Bears, the BBC has proceeded cautiously. Understandably the BBC do no wish to find themselves before the courts or wish to unfairly tarnish the reputation of any of Britain’s major sports stars – including […]

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Sinn Féin and doing what they’re told

If there’s one thing unionist politicians enjoy doing, it’s telling republicans who should represent them (republicans, that is). We got a lot of this during the years when the Orange Order thought that it had an unfettered right to march where it chose: if there was to be any discussion with residents about this right, […]

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TCD ORANGE LODGE TO BE RECONSTITUTED by Donal Kennedy

Between the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 and the Niemba Ambush in the Congo in November 1960 not a single  member of the Irish Defence Forces was killed in action. The happy hiatus in Irish military deaths was a direct result of the supposed failure of the 1916 Rising. No man living in […]

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