December, 2020

Does Stephen Collins have a crystal ball? Does the Irish Times dabble in tea-leaf reading? I’m beginning to think both may be possible. In recent weeks both Stephen and the IT have been cranking up the anti-Sinn Féin rhetoric. Last week in a column Stephen called for “the truth” to be told about Sinn Féin’s […]

Jaeger bombs or petrol bombs?  How should we remember the creation of the State of Northern Ireland? No telegram from the Queen, just 3 million pounds from the Secretary of State to promote Northern Ireland with in the United Kingdom?  Whatever way people intend to remember the creation of the Northern State one thing is […]

Grantham Council – Grantham being Margaret Thatcher’s home town – are having an argument about a ten-foot statue of the former prime minister. It cost £300K to create and will cost another £100k to put in place. Oh, and a Facebook site has had 14,000 sign-ups of people who want to throw eggs at it. […]

Following the defeat of Napoleon and  the restoration of France’s Bourbon Dynasty, Talleyrand, who had kept his head through Revolution, Empire and Restoration, held that the Bourbons had learned nothing and  forgotten nothing. In this alleged Decade of  Remembrance it seems to me that the Tanaiste, Leo Varadkar, never  learned anything of history in the […]

Unless we are completely incapacitated mentally and physically we are autonomous, i.e.. self-governing. Up to a point, Lord Copper, or even Lord Sumption. Thus we may choose to leap off Beachy Head or the Cliffs of Moher. But we will still be subject to the Law of Gravity, which not even an Act of the […]

The Report below is from THE IRISH BULLETIN the Official Organ of Dail Eireann the democratically established Irish Parliament    and the only legitimate Parliament of All Ireland on 9 June 1921,All passages in Inverted Commas are quotations from the  Dublin’s (Unionist) IRISH TIMES THE   INAUGURATION   OF   THE   “NORTHERN”   PARLIAMENT.               On Tuesday, the 7th of June 1921, the Parliament of the six […]

If you’re a Sinn Féin member or supporter, maybe get back into bed and pull the duvet over your head. Because this morning’s Irish Times has several salvoes directed at your party of choice. First up is the IT’s political sketch-writer, Miriam Lord. She gives considerable space to what she terms “a Shinner sinner”, Brian […]

THE OBSERVER of London is a pillar of the British establishment. It sometimes boobs. Believing Kim Philby a loyal member of British Intelligence, it gave him the cover of a correspondent in Beirut which helped his escape to Moscow. It was wiser in its choice of Conor Cruise O’Brien as its Editor in Chief who […]

If there is EU-UK Brexit agreement it means one of two things.  Either the British Ministry of Defense has finished undermining the Good Friday Agreement or Whitehall now has plans to avoid any EU Treaty requirements. That’s the British; that’s what they do!   Britain claims to be exceptional because it is ‘freedom-loving’ and deserves to have its […]

Charlie Pride, John Prine, Diego Maradona – we’ve lost so many great  names this year. Can you grieve for someone you’ve never met? Or is it a case of ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls’? Over the weekend, David McWilliams pointed out that there are more  immigrants than unionists in Ireland, and that there is a unionist  majority in just two counties out of thirty-two. How should unionists react to this? Nationalists/republicans? And is the centenary of the foundation of Northern Ireland something we  can all celebrate? (quiet at the back there, please…) Press the magic button and all will be revealed …