Gabriella clung tearfully to her mother’s arms, terrified that these men again wanted to take Mum away . The woman was Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the Iranian Police had arrived to return her to prison . She had been granted temporary release to be with her family and four year old child. The appalling trauma […]
September, 2018
IS GORDON BROWN A HUMBUG? by Donal Kennedy
You should judge for yourself. I’m not infallible and you are not being bullied into believing that he [ see above ] is or isn’t. For myself, I have long believed that he is a humbug and a moral coward. It was when I came across a book of essays under his name. Its […]
LAPDOG BITES BULLDOG (8) by Perkin Warbeck
The Palestinian Flag is to be seen on Hill 16 on big match days. That would be the tricolour of three equal horizontal stripes (black, white and green from top to bottom) overlaid by a red triangle issuing from the hoist. (Topographical note: For the benefit of those who pronounce the k in […]
WAS THE GREAT WAR CHINA’S WAR? WHY WERE CHINESE WORKERS DYING IN EUROPE? by Donal Kennedy
When my father worked as an Engineer Inspector in the Irish Land Commission, one of his senior colleagues was Charles Kettle, son of Tom Kettle, the former Nationalist MP, barrister, poet, former professor of Economics at UCD, pro-“Great War” propagandist who joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who fell in futile battle in September 1916. […]
Drew Harris: well-paid and forgetful?
I have just listened to an interview on RTÉ Radio One with Josephine Feehily, the chairperson of the south’s Policing Authority. I caught only a snatch of it, but she appeared to indicate that Drew Harris, the new Garda Commissioner, was the best person in the world for the job. They searched and searched, she […]
MY GODFATHERS! by Donal Kennedy
Unlike the Irish, the English, even in this secular age, are not addicted to blasphemy, nor were they when Joyce wrote Ulysses.The antics of Buck Mulligan scandalised their English visitor at the Martello Tower at Sandycove. An apocryphal story of a foreigner coming across a game of pitch-and-toss in Dublin had him amazed […]
The tremor as Brexit deadline approaches
Do you suffer from insomnia over Brexit? A week or so back, I was talking to two people who may not stay awake at night but but who certainly fret over it quite a lot. They’re members of Border Communities Against Brexit, and both live in the north close to the border. We talked for […]
WAS THE FIRST WORLD WAR IRELAND’S WAR? HOW SHOULD WE COMMEMORATE THE ARMISTICE? by Donal Kennedy
Two of my mother’s four brothers, and the husbands, or future husbands of both her sisters, fought in British uniform in the 1914-1918 war. Ours was not an atypical Irish family. But I would reject the claim that the war was Ireland’s War. It was foisted on Ireland largely by a back-bench member of England’s […]
Loughinisland: tragedy and the role of the police
Some actions are so stupid, you wonder if the actors are making some sort of satirical, self-parodying statement. It’s like Gilbert and Sullivan’ s comic policemen, or the Keystone Cops, only with a nightmare background. Yesterday one of those super-dumb events occurred. Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney, two highly-respected journalists , were arrested on the […]