June, 2019

A few years back, I tweeted a suggestion that dissident Irish republicans weren’t the only ones who went in for dressing young people up in paramilitary garb. Immediately the twittersphere was filled with abuse and denunciation of this gross slur on the Boys’ Brigade. The report below by the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) suggests the Boys’ Brigade are only in the ha’penny place.  I wonder will Stephen Nolan highlight this dress-’em-up activity?  Shocking new photographs reveal that a children’s nursery in Lincolnshire dressed pre-school children in real military body armour to mark Armed Forces Day this week.The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) was made aware of the photographs by a concerned relative.The incident took place at the ABC Nursery in Boston, Lincolnshire, where a visiting soldier […]

BLISS WAS IT THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE? How THE TIMES hailed the 5th Anniversary of the Murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie June 28 1919 – “On this the morning of the day appointed for the signature of the most far-reaching and the most comprehensive effort ever made by diplomacy to […]

How do you feel about free speech? Ask the wrong person that question and you might get a punch in the face. But by and large we would say Yes, of course, free speech is a fundamental right for everyone. Even Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have a right to free speech. But free speech […]

THE TIMES each morning reprints a piece from exactly a century ago when Britain and France were punishing  Germany for losing a warunleashed by themselves after years of careful planning. While most of the guns had fallen silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, German men, women […]

I Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus “Attached is a good explanation of an issue is that not too well understood.”—Fr. Sean McManus  Extending Irish presidential voting rights to north is a no-brainer A referendum on extending the vote in presidential elections to Irish citizens living outside the Republic appears likely to be held this year. […]

I don’t know the inner workings of the DUP so I’m going to go out on something of a limb here when I say that  DUP people don’t tell each other much. Arlene doesn’t put her arm around the shoulders of Nigel and whisper in his ear; Sammy doesn’t retreat to the corner of a […]

There can’t be many people in the Western world, and maybe in the Eastern as well, who haven’t seen this photograph of a would-be immigrant with his almost-two-year-old daughter, face down in the water of the Rio Grande.  What is harrowing about the picture is the way the man has his little daughter inside his […]

Distributed to congress by Irish National Caucus “ More proof, if proof be needed, about Tory blindness on The North/Northern Ireland.”—Fr. Sean McManus Boris Johnson’s border solutions derided Boris Johnson claimed there were ‘abundant technical fixes’ that would avoid checks on the border  John Manley. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, June 25, 2019 TORY leadership contender […]

“ THE IRISH TIMES of June 20th had a piece by the historian Michael B Barry headed “How the British faked ‘Battles’ during the War of Independence..” The faking was exposed  to the world at the time and laughed to scorn in the House of Commons itself. How THE IRISH TIMES dealt with the story […]

Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus “ The eminent Belfast historian Eamon Phoenix provides an excellent summation of where ‘we are  at’ in the Northern Ireland-Brexit issue in this article in today’s Irish News of Belfast: ‘From the confirmation of the Border in 1925 until the O’Neill-Lemass summit of 1965 it seemed to many in Britain […]