May, 2018

Alison gives me a dressing down

I was on the Nolan Show on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh this morning. They were talking about the planned demonstration in front of Belfast City Hall today by pro-choicers in the abortion debate. They plan to have abortion pills delivered by a robot, controlled from the Netherlands, and some women there will then publicly take these […]

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Practising Catholics and voting Yes

I note where Bishop Kevin Doran of Elfin has said that practising Catholics who voted Yes in the recent referendum should “consider going to confession”. “Every person’s vote has both a moral significance and a political significance,” he adds. As belts of a crozier go, it’s a pretty mild one: Archbishop John Charles McQuaid would […]

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The DUP: deaf to the winds of change

  I wonder how it feels to be a unionist these days. There was a time when, at the mention of a united Ireland, unionists (and a considerable swathe of ‘nationalists’) recoiled in horror or dissolved in laughter. There were even ‘nationalist’ politicians in the south who called on Sinn Féin and others to get […]

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The Repeal of the Eighth: is the north next?

There was a time when unionist politicians claimed to have no interest in events south of the border. It was another country, they explained, and the north was part of the UK. When it became absolutely necessary to withdraw their heads from the sand, they looked to London, not Dublin. Brexit has made the unionist […]

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The south of Ireland gives its answer

The abortion debate has been won by the side that wants abortion available in the south  (and in the north anon),  so it’s pretty pointless to think of reinforcing the stable door after the horse has kicked it down and gone thundering off. The electorate of the south have made it clear that they want no-questions-asked abortion up […]

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The spin’s the thing

  “The medium is the message” Marshall Mcluhan used to say back in the 1960s, and some of us still haven’t got his point. So often, what pretends to be a neutral source shapes the message it delivers. Two examples I came on a week or two back. The first was from The Guardian, which […]

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Nelson’s one-eyed view

  Oh dear – nother day, another conversation with Nelson McCausland on the Nolan Show. Despite temptations not to, I like Nelson – in fact I exchanged a few pleasant words with him in the Linenhall Library earlier this week. But when he gets on the airwaves, he really does talk some poppycock. Maybe he […]

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The early purges

                             The Early Purges                                    . I was six when I first saw kittens drown. Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’, Into a bucket; […]

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Karen says No. And she knows what’s good for us. Right?

The Brexit debate has released a tsunami of irony which is in danger of drowning us all. If you’ve not been living in an octupus’s garden you’ll know that Arlene Foster is very fond of the UK. The other day she drew a shimmering picture of the outward-looking, multi-ethnic, twenty-first century desirability of it all. And […]

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