July, 2020

Today Pat and I have a chat about the state of the coalition in the Free  State, aka the Republic of Ireland, aka Ireland. Fianna Fáil and the  Greens seem to be coming apart at the seams – Fianna Fáil has already  sacked one of its ministers, the leader of the Green Party has survived an election by the skin of his teeth, and their Chief Whip is voting  contrary to the rest of the Green Party TDs. Then there’s Fianna Fail  and its republicanism, which is TOTALLY different from the Sinn Féin  version, even though Micheál Martin’s father, from whom he says he  got his republicanism, signed publicly his support for the Hunger  Strikers  back in the 1980s. Then there’s Donald Trump, who has mused about postponing the  coming presidential election. Nothing to do with his poll ratings or his handling of Covid 19 of course…

Listening to the radio and Johnny Cash singing ‘Burning ring of Fire’ and the memories came flooding back of the late Tom Mc Gowan, a Derry Social Worker, and of a week end spent in the Cork/ Kerry Gaeltacht, many years ago. I cannot   name this unspoilt little place but I regret that I have […]

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” – Edward Murrow “Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?” – Neil Gaiman Do you ever notice the so-called “elephant in the room” and it becomes more and more obvious to the point where everyone knows […]

This afternoon I talked to Oznur  Yalgin, a young Turkish woman living in Belfast. She’s a former teacher of English in Turkey and has published many short stories in journals and magazines. A collection of her short stories will be published in Turkey at some point in the autumn. But the thread running through my […]

Having evacuated his system of the degree to which he believes Sinn Féin still need house-training, the Irish Times’s tame unionist Newton Emerson today explains the north’s educational system to us. It’s a mess, he says. He knows this, he says, because businesses are repeatedly reporting “a lack a basic employability skills among graduates.”  Behind […]

If you were to talk to well-known unionists like Gregory Campbell or Billy Hutchinson, and mention the poverty and hardship which many nationalists endured under the unionist regime over fifty years, they will counter your words by pointing out that there were many Protestant/unionists who also lived lives of deprivation over the first fifty years […]

 A female writing a letter in THE IRISH TIMES today  (July 21)  doesn’t like THE QUIET MAN.  No surprise there then. Most writers in that paper, male, female, straight or LGBT love what I hate and hate what I love. What does surprise me is that an English friend of mine with a love and […]

A report published on the 28th of August 2012 by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine declares that  ‘without remedial action now Gaza’s problems in water and electricity, education and health, will only get worse over the coming years’. Maxwell Gaylord warned, ‘Gaza will have half a million more people by 2020 […]

It’s funny peculiar and funny haha but Kevin Maher is back in “Times 2” today 27 July. His subject is SWIFT, not the late Dean of St Patrick’s, but TAYLOR SWIFT an American female singer who has sold 50 million albums, but meant nothing to him  until she put on a Val Doonican cardigan.  I […]

I’m sitting here this morning listening to the Nolan Show.  It started with questions about the mockery of the Irish language by Gregory Campbell, but now we’ve a woman on complaining about the role of Sinn Féin at Rose Lawn cemetery. She says she has grandparents buried there, and the thought of ‘those people’ walking […]