September, 2019

A Shared Home Place – Seamus Mallon by John Patton

  Bond Street was a Protestant and Loyalist heartland which celebrated its historical totems with vigour.  Growing up in the Waterside area of Derry, I can share and empathise with Seamus Mallon’s memories of his childhood. Our neighbours and the majority of my friends were not Catholics but we enjoyed, without rancour,  many of the […]

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Lethal words and lethal actions

This is getting serious. Having watched the antics in the British House of Commons last week, where MPs were screaming across the chamber at each other, it’s hard not to conclude that  violence could break out at any moment. And I’m not talking about violence like Bernadette Devlin clocking Reginald Maudling.  I’m talking about lethal […]

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Will the EU tinker with the backstop to mollify crazy Bojo?

So. Can I ask how you’re feeling today?  I appreciate that this question isn’t directed at everybody. There are thousands of people who couldn’t give  a monkey’s about Brexit and occupy their thoughts with other issues of the day, like will the Republic of Ireland team qualify for Euro 2020, are Belfast’s bus-lanes a money-making […]

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BIRDBRAINED PYGMIES AND PARROTTED VIEWS by Donal Kennedy

Readers may have noticed that I have revealed foibles and obsessions and maybe a bias or two in my contributions but I like to think that I have highlighted neglected corners of history or interpreted them in an interesting way. I  don’t claim infallibility, but I do attempt to base my arguments on evidence which […]

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I believe in yesterday

Was yesterday a good or a bad day? It was a bad day for Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.  Britain’s Supreme Court found unanimously that Johnson had acted unlawfully by suspending parliament.  In the US, the Democratic Party finally decided to go for it and see if they can impeach Donald Trump for using aid […]

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The Supreme Court will find against Bojo today. Or will it?

If I had careful sense (not to be confused with common sense), I’d postpone the writing of this blog until after 10.30  this morning. That’s when the British Supreme Court will deliver its judgement on Boris Johnson’s ‘proroguing’ of parliament. But I’ve made it a life-long rule to be as careless with my sense as […]

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LAPDOG BITES BULLDOG (59) by Perkin Warbeck

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA                                                  ‘Some people think soccer* is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that’. (* called ‘football’ by soccer imperialists. Or, indeed, himperialists and herperialists alike, for this is a shared space). This is a quote […]

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‘A hard border will lead to violence? Pshaw!’ – Stephen Collins

There are people who think that partition hasn’t worked. They’re right, in that partition has damaged both the south and the north of Ireland, giving us two damaged states in Ireland, conservative and corrupt in       many areas. In one respect, though, it has succeeded: it has produced a group of people in the south who can be depended on to produce the    case for northern unionism and against northern nationalism. For          months now, Arlene Foster has been arguing that a border in Ireland     doesn’t have to be a militarised border, that talk of violence was              Project Fear.  A few days ago, Stephen Collins (I repeat, Virginia, no        relation) of the Irish Times occupied considerable space to argue the    same thing.  In response I wrote the letter below. It wasn’t printed. Quelle surprise. Sir, Your columnist Stephen Collins (no relation) is wide of the mark in stating “A number of leading Irish politicians, and some British and European ones too, have fallen into the trap of suggesting that renewed violence in the North will be one […]

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