April, 2019

T FROM  THE IRISH TIMES 23 AUGUST 2012 “Most informed Irish men and women, whatever thir views of the 1922 Split, rightly honour the memory of Michael Collins, as they do the memories of Harry Boland and Cathal Brugha, who fell to the forces under Collins’s command in 1922. Those men are honoured because they […]

 The University of Cambridge is going to trawl its sins from the past. Or possible sins. Or some of them, anyway. It has set up a two-year study to find out how the university contributed to and profited from slavery during the colonial era.  A college in Oxford University is doing something similar. And so […]

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA   The seamless morph from Dublin to DUPlin as the capital of the Orange Free Stateen  was a doddle, it being on from the very orff, Carl. Such good fortuna to have Dame Carmina Burana red-hand picked  as your  lawfully wedded and Lambeg drumheaded  political partner. Rhythm is the primary KTP musical […]

 Mishal Husain was standing in for Andrew Marr this morning and she interviewed Fr Martin Magill about…Like the good priest himself, I don’t need to finish that sentence. You  know what it was about. Nothing too new emerged from the interview. Mishal gently raised the question of politics being at the heart of a sermon […]

The death of  Lyra McKee brought unity of a sort among our political parties. A joint statement of condemnation was issued, and some commentators wondered why  it couldn’t be like this all of the time. There is something to be said for political parties coming together to convey public anger over this killing, but it’s […]

 And so it begins again. Stormont, for so long the home of the tumbling tumbleweed,  could well switch on its lights again,  have DUP exchanging cheerful greetings with Shinners over urinal stalls or cups of coffee, and the House on the Hill could shine its light to the world, showing how new life can be […]

It is said that government is necessary for the existence of a civilized society.  The clarion calls for the return of the  political institutions fail to address a question: what constitutes a civilized society? It would appear that the few who avail of lucrative fees, expenses and subsidised food remain unclear in relation to what […]

The May, 1916 execution of Easter Rebellion leaders could not stop the march to Irish freedom.  Nor could the murders of Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday end the fight for equality in Northern Ireland.  “But Ireland’s peace in the era of Brexit,” noted Past National President Ned McGinley of Wilkes-Barre, “is threatened again by UK corruption of the peace […]

The American magazine TIME  whose founder, Henry Luce in 1941 was the  harbinger of “The American Century” of global imperialism,  has deemed the leaders of the Irish campaign to legalise the destruction of human life in the womb as “Global Icons.” How the late Mr Luce, the American son  of Christian missionaries in China, would […]

“It is in Sinn Féin’s interest as much as everyone else’s to move towards recognizing the Provisional IRA campaign as wrong, rather than a tactic warranted by circumstance. [Conor] Murphy, an ex-IRA prisoner, would have the authority to carry that off.” Thus Newton Emerson, in the   Irish Times  this morning, explaining the need for regime […]