June, 2018

SWINDLERS’ LISTS? by Donal Kennedy

In my last BLOG “BACKDOOR DIPLOMACY …….”  I recalled how the former Director of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, in October 2015 confirmed that the British Government had been lying for 100 years about Nurse Edith Cavell, whose execution by the Germans had been justified according to international protocol during war. Tens of thousands of chivalrous […]

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Saturday Pics of the week

Pics 1-4 are by John Patton    Pic 1    Pic 2   Pic 3 Pic 4   “We gathered as a family to scatter my Mother-in-Law’s ashes in Glencoe. She died, aged 96, in January. A trailblazer, in her own modest way, she arrived in Glencoe in 1947 to work as a rare,  female […]

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Mary McAleese: a Catholic loose cannon?

  Former Irish president Mary McAleese appears to have travelled some distance from her Catholicism in recent years. If you look for her in the ranks of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin in August, which Pope Francis is set to attend, you’ll look in vain. She won’t be there, because she believes it […]

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How skilled we are at avoiding complexity

How are you regarding the Catholic Church? Are you against Pope John Paul II because he was strictly orthodox in terms of Church matters and punished those clergy who stepped out of line? Or have you forgotten to factor in his out-spoken concern at the obscenity of war, no matter who was waging it? And […]

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Sectarianism: is it the individual or the institution?

    I was at the launch of Sinn Féin’s Stand Up Against Sectarianism yesterday. It was a beautiful morning and the sentiments expressed boiled down to a simple truism: you can’t be a republican and sectarian at the same time. In her usual business-like way, Mary-Lou McDonald talked about rolling up sleeves and tackling […]

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