March, 2020

When the Tory government first came up with the Dominic Cummings wheeze of ‘herd immunity’, it took someone of John O’Dowd’s stature (yes, Virginia, physical stature indeed, but I’m talking about inner qualities) to come out and denounce the people who would follow such  a policy as a ‘shire’ of bastards. In this morning’s Irish […]

The stories I heard about Charlie Haughey from those that knew him In the FCA were of a Jack the Lad who drove a Jaguar when they were lucky if they had secondhand pushbikes and who was a graduate and Chartered Accounant when few of them had been past primary school. Like them Charlie came […]

One of our well known hymns is ‘Be Not Afraid, I go before you always…” We could all sing that song now whether we are believers or not. We all need strength and courage during this awful pandemic. Whether you believe in Jesus Christ or not, his story is a story of courage and endurance. […]

Early technical difficulties now solved – click on video below This is something I’d like to make a weekly feature. Pat McArt was  (among other things) editor of the Derry Journal during the 1980s, and was an interviewee in my last two books – Laying It On The Line  and               before that Martin McGuinness :The Man I Knew.  I’d appreciate any      constructive feedback by email – judejcollins@gmail.com – or on               Facebook.  Bain sult as – Enjoy. 

F In 1970 Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney were put on trial charged with trying to smuggle arms into Ireland. The first trial collapsed in a week. The Jury in the re-trial acquitted them. Nobody reading the testimony of the chief Prosecution witness, Defence Minister James Gibbons,can have been surprised that the jury acquitted Haughey, […]

A woman died of the ‘Spanish flu’ in 1918 in the small  townland of Kincraigy, in north Donegal. I don’t know what age she was but I do know she left two children behind,  two year old twins – a boy and a girl.  The boy was particularly important to me. He was my father. Although my […]

Harold MacMillan, in commenting about life and politics, once said “it’s not one damn thing, it’s every damn thing after another!” Of course he was right, just when we thought things were returning to “normal” and Stormont was back up and running, we have been hit by a deadly virus which has claimed the lives […]

Hell, said Nietzche, is other people. And you can what he was getting at. When we consider history – in the twentieth century alone, two World Wars, the dropping of atom bombs on two Japanese cities, the lethal lie that was the Vietnam War, the decades of discrimination and gerrymander in our tight-twisted NE corner […]

This blog originally appeared in this week’s  edition of the Andersonstown News Two of the biggest jolts to public thinking this past week  about  the Covad-19 pandemic came from Health Minister Robin Swann and An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.  Swann said that in the worst case scenario, 14,000 people here in the north could die.  Varadkar said that a surge in Covid-19 cases […]

Did you go to your door  at 8.00 pm yesterday and applaud health workers? Hold up a sign at your window saying how wonderful they are? I didn’t. For a start, I have an inbuilt aversion to producing an emotion at the bidding of others – I prefer when it comes from within. But there […]