February, 2019

Pics 1-3 are by Perkin Warbeck Pic 1 Pic 3 Photo 1:      The Elephant House, around the corner from the Royal Mile, Edinburgh where J.K. Rowling wrote   ‘Harry Potter’.   Photo 2:          ‘The Cellar Door’, a pub directly across the street.   Photo 3:         A sign in the pub window.                       CELTIC   POTTERY   The Potters 3: Archie, Maureen and […]

Princes and powers have interests, not friends. When James II was overthrown in England, the Pope sympathised with him. But the Pope was at loggerheads with the Catholic King of France, Louis XIV and allied himself with the usurper of the Crowns of Britain and Ireland, Prince William of Orange. Cromwell was no friend of […]

Just as there are those who think sport and politics shouldn’t mix (so what are they playing all those national anthems for?),  there are those who think that the whole Brexit matter should be approached as a purely economic question. There’s a degree of sense in such a stand. Brexit is about what country trades […]

The historian Diarmaid Ferriter has remarked on a well known journalist, born in the 1950s or thereabouts who first heard of the Irish Civil War about 1970 and wondered why. I was born in 1941 and never heard about it in school for a number of reasons. Our teachers,parents, uncles, and aunts had lived through […]

There’s a small black devil that dances at the back of the mind of every Irish person. It is that the EU will do a deal with the UK and toss Ireland north and south overboard.  This devil has today danced its way onto the lips of that sternly principled man, Ian Paisley Jr. The […]

 I’ve written recently on the failure of the League of Nations to abolish war. And I believe I identified the main culprits without doing them an injustice. Had I said that Britain gave free passage to Mussolini’s Fascists through the Suez Canal on their way to the Rape of Abyssinia, I would have done Britain […]

The Blueshirt narrative today is often presented in the southern media by Ivan Yates a former Fine Gael TD now a presenter on Newstalk. Yates states that both Sinn Fein and the DUP are ‘a disgrace’. These ‘two hard-line parties’ should be working together. ‘One is as bad as the other.’ This narrative misrepresents the […]

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts..” The identity of the author of those lines is disputed. Actors fake characters and playwrights hides behind invented names and reinvent themselves. For example –  Two […]

Normally,  I can take it. We all can. You get used to having a Belfast City Hall that’s got Irish memorabilia the way a haystack has a needle, with the needle being the odd Irish stained glass window and the haystack the dour figure of Queen Victoria and the many generals and noblemen outside. You […]

Science has long  recognised  that the brain continues to develop during teenage years and that  different areas grow at their own pace.  Young people’s brains are insufficiently  matured  to make serious, life decisions alone. This means that teens are likely to arrive at conclusions, based on emotion,  (because of their developed limbic system) rather than […]