October, 2020

Eighty-three years ago Irish voters free to do so enacted a  liberal democratic constitution which guaranteed freedom of, and freedom from religion. It recorded the statistical fact that the Roman Catholic Church was the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens. The great majority of the minority of citizens NOT […]

I glimpsed a headline on TV recently which said something like “Is this Edwin Poots’s crocodile moment?”  The reference, of course, was to Arlene Foster’s disastrous comment going into a general election a few years back, where she said republicans were like crocodiles. It seriously damaged the DUP in that election and gave nationalists and […]

According to the BBC, ‘MI5 has up to 700 staff in Northern Ireland based at regional headquarters in Holywood, County Down. It took over the lead role in intelligence gathering on dissident republicans from the police in 2007. The operational framework was set out as part of the St Andrews Agreement a year earlier’. On […]

 President  Trump unashamedly presents the unmasked face of the wackiest, weirdest and wickedest clown in electoral history. But the choice between himself and Biden, indeed between Republicans and Democrats is today, as it has been for most of their party’s history, one between the Plague and the Pox. Trump and  Vice President Mike Pence profess […]

Comparisons, they say, are odious. But as I watched Micheál Martin appear last night at the top of the carpeted stair and twinkle-toe his way down to the microphone, I couldn’t help but remember a moment in THE TRUMP SHOW ( it’s on BBC TWO) where Trump, a showman to his cuticles, strode along a […]

On this sodden Autumn afternoon, Pat and I do our best to bring, if not sunshine, then enlightenment into your day. We start by discussing that intellectual giant Edwin Poots, who claims  that the Covid virus is six times more active in nationalist areas than  unionist, and what’s more the nationalists have brought it all on  themselves. Mmmm.  Then we move to talk about the ghastly killing and beheading in Paris of the teacher who was studying freedom of speech with his students  and was showing them the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.  Is the ‘free speech’  argument water-tight or (to mix metaphors) has it an Achilles heel? Finally we respond to an Irish Times article about the joys of taking off all your clothes and walking around. Tune in and see how I strip Pat’s  argument down to the bare essentials…

Because I’m a slow learner, I’ve just come from listening to William Crawley presenting Talkback. On the programme he had Nelson McCausland, who supported his creationist colleague Edwin Poots, in his charge that Covid-19’s recent surge goes back to Bobby Storey’s funeral and GAA celebrations, and that nationalist areas are virus plagued, vis-à-vis unionist areas, […]

Samuel Paty was a teacher who was killed and beheaded in a Paris suburb. He is said to have died because he showed and discussed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad with his pupils. In the wake of his killing, thousands in Paris and other French cities have demonstrated against this brutality. There’s something so primitive […]

Emmanuel Macron a few weeks ago was declaring that Lebanon’s government needs reforming.  Though married to his ex-teacher, it seems nobody has told him how France and Britain  seized territories from the Ottoman Empire, exploited them for their own purposes, murdered the inhabitants, imposed borders without consulting the survivors and created the chaos that has […]

This blog first appeared as a column in the Andersonstown NewsT For those of us who had a picture in our mind of  Boris Johnson driving the Brexit train at speed towards disaster, all the while muttering “A bad deal is worse than no deal”, there is just the faintest pin-point of light in the darkness. The cut-off point of 15 October, which Johnson had […]