March, 2020

Michael John Cummings is Secretary of the American Brexit Committee March 19, 2020 Philadelphia & Washington, D. C.   Under the cover of frenzied pandemic responses by governments around the world, Britain is rushing the get-out-of-jail free bill through Parliament for security forces who have killed innocent civilians in N. I.   It was done without any prior consultation […]

I’ve seen it claimed that England only once waged war in self defence and that was when it was menaced by the Spanish Armada. And it seems that neither English seamanship nor martial endeavour, nor indeed both together was the decisive factor, but the Deity, on a   (mischievous?) whim sent a Protestant Wind. In  […]

The IRISH TIMES (March 18) in a portentous and pretentious IRISH TIMES VIEW appears to want to dismember Syria. Perhaps its reasons are locked under oathbound secrecy in its Trustees, established by the untrustworthy British Fixer, the late Arnold Goodman. If THE TIMES of London favours the dismemberment of Syria, it may have a more […]

Several decades ago, when we were establishing a part-time Master’s programme at Óllscoil Uladh/Ulster University, we included an online element in the form of emails and online announcements. This strand of the programme got mixed reactions, with one otherwise-intelligent student asking “Would it not be simpler to just phone people?” When people are used to […]

Lord Chesterfield donated the Phoenix Park to the people of Dublin. I don’t know how he acquired it in the first place, but, fair dues. He left us Dubliners in his debt. He also published letters to his son, of such cynicism that they angered Wolfe Tone. I forget Tone’s exact words. He probable thought […]

There are a number of things about Leo Varadkar I don’t like, not least his pig-headed refusal to meet with Sinn Féin (a pig-headedness matched only by the north’s DUP Minister of Education Peter Weir, who refuses to allow a Derry school to close even though they have a suspected case of coronavirus).  But last […]

During a torrential downpour on an Italian campsite after my wife and I had set up a pup tent twenty -five years ago we sought shelter in the camp restaurant and found ourselves seated with a Dutch couple -.a Lutheran clergyman and his wife. We made the best of it and wine and conversation flowed […]

 Here’s Fergal Keane in this morning’s Irish Times:  “I don’t know if  [David] Cullinane ever heard a shot fired in anger, or stood amid the gore of a bombing, or if he has seen the mess a high-velocity round make of the human head….I  saw much of what I have described above – in the […]

This article first appeared in Pat McArt’s Donegal Democrat column. A friend rang me up the week after the election to take the mick asking “seeing you are such a political oracle can you predict what was going to happen in regards to the formation  of the next government?” Ignoring the somewhat piss-take nature of his […]

Thomas Paine lived in the late eighteenth century, but his words are as true – maybe more true – today: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the […]