August, 2017

  My late father had a great word for anything he disagreed with or considered foolish -which was quite a lot. The word is ‘codology’-nothing to do with fish but more to describe being conned or hoodwinked. It’s not a word I have ever used before but I will introduce it now in relation to […]

Norneverland truly is a madhouse. Listening to the local BBC Radio Ulster, provides a microcosm of what we are supposedly being led to accept as a rational society.It’s summertime so politics are on holidays and are essentially all but dead ,having reached a granite impasse of some serious irrefutable logic, in any case. That came […]

  The  Perkin’s inner easy listener can still (vividly) recall the Day  in D Major when first came forth and entered into his earshot to nestle there as a most welcome earworm. Only one who could be guilty of ‘treason, spoils and  stratagems’ would have failed to respond to the Kaempfertian ceol. That, erm, Happy […]

Irish Times 7 August 2017 Sir, – Barry Roche noted that, following my complaint, the 2012 Gerry Gregg and Eoghan Harris RTÉ documentary An Tost Fada (The Long Silence) was “corrected for some errors since its first screening” (Home News, July 31st). The programme was re-edited for the recent West Cork History Festival, after I alerted RTÉ […]

  The great African-American writer and human rights campaigner, James Baldwin, once wrote:  “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.” I think this is a perceptive observation by one of the […]

It’s been a busy summer so far. Isn’t it always in the way that the winter weather creates such mayhem outside that when the weather changes and the sun begins to shine it reveals all those jobs that you haven’t been able to do. The good wife was first to spot the wasps sneaking back […]

Leo Varadkar talks in a soft voice but he’s no pussycat. Judging by his recent comment on Brexit in Ireland ( or “on our island”, as he puts it), he’s more of a lion-heart. For decades now, we’ve heard nothing about Irish-British relations but how good they are, never better, top drawer. As for Brexit, […]

  The bombing by US air force planes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August 1945 resulted in 129,000 people being killed and thousands more injured. When Germany surrendered in May 1945 the Japanese refused to surrender. On 2nd September the Japanese signed the Instrument of Surrender thus ending World War II. There had been numerous bombings of Japan by the US air force in […]

Pics 1-4 are by Perkin Warbeck    Pic 1  Pic 2 Pic 3   Pic 4 “CARS and BARS by Perkin Warbeck The title is borrowed from ‘Detroit City’ which contained the signature lines: ‘By days I make the cars By nights I make the bars’. Which was popularised by Bobby Bare (pronounced ‘Bobba Bar’ […]

Do Sinn Féin want to get the Assembly functioning again at Stormont? Arlene Foster claims she has watched and listened to Sinn Féin spokespersons and has decided they don’t. Rather than asking if she’s right, a better question might be  “Why would she say that?” Well it could be because she believes it’s so. She may […]