October, 2016

“Pure bitterness!” a friend commented after watching First Minister Arlene Foster’s DUP conference speech. You know, the one where she accused southern politicians of ‘poaching’ firms and companies from the north, in the wake of Brexit.  The only ones with a hard border, she said, were southern politicians who carried a hard border in their […]

A newsletter in church today carried a piece by a recently deceased priest on a French  Trappist monk, Charles de Foucauld, who is a candidate for beatification and the  late author was one of those involved in the presentation of his cause to the Vatican. De Foucauld, an aristocrat, was a commissioned officer and saw […]

David Lloyd George was known by one and all in his day as able and ruthless and a shameless liar.  So all of what he said should be cross-checked with other sources. So far as I know, and I am not a historian,  much less a distinguished one, the following remarks of his on March […]

    There is a recent phenomenon called the ‘Evil Clown ’ which has caused a whole lot of upset and even driven that Super-Mac of Malevolence, Ronald McDonald into taking a hasty Sabbatical. Unfortunately, this is a phenomenon which is not at all recent in the Free Southern Stateen. It concerns a clown of […]

  We all know that Enda Kenny is soon to exit the front bench theatre of Free State politics, but this rotten Fine Gael-led Government that seems totally  incapable of stepping up to the challenges facing the population is only on life-support at the benevolence of the establishment-wing of Fianna Fáil. The faded flags of […]

Comparisons between Hillary Clinton and Gerry Adams aren’t at first glance, terribly easy to spot. But thanks to the FBI’s latest statement on Hillary’s emails, the similarities become clearer. Whatever your opinion of Hillary as a person and/or as a politician, it is undeniable that the right in America have made every conceivable charge against her […]

  I do not often buy the NewsLetter but I must confess that I did on Saturday to find out what Arlene Foster, the First Minister, was saying about Brexit. The front page headline drew my attention; “No Passport Controls After Brexit; Foster Vows”. Then inside there was an interview of sorts with her by […]

  Some years ago, when (part of) Ireland had her own currency, a friend of mine from Belfast started learning Irish in London. A Republican, Communist and Feminist from a good Protestant family, she thought it a shame that her otherwise fine education had something missing. She was bemused to find that our rude forebears […]

Someone asked me back when Colum Eastwood was elected leader of the SDLP if I was in some way keen that a younger person had taken the leadership of one of the then Executive parties in the North. Given that he’s the leader of a rather sneaky quasi-conservative (Catholic) grouping of greying establishment wannabes, I […]

Are we really living in a form of craftily designed two-headed benign dictatorship in Norneverland ,coming as it does , with a built-in “petition of concern” which can veto just about any decision which is made by a majority and overturn their view , steam-rolling any chance of change, flat on the ground? Is this […]