January, 2021

For the first time in 49 years, the Bloody Sunday Commemorative March has been forced off the road, as the Covid-19 worldwide pandemic makes the march a victim of the social distancing regulations now in force to combat the virus. Here Betty McBrearty Doherty, a native of Derry city and campaigner for justice, explains how […]

Wikipedia is a handy but unreliable source of information. Like other media, even Scripture, it needs to be approached with caution. Take the Old Testament. I’m not convinced that intelligent people wandered for forty years in a desert unable  to read the heavens. Sailors and landlubbers alike navigated  by the stars for thousands of years. Those who […]

 OK, let’s see if you’re alert this breezy Saturday morning. Starter for 10: What two words are Arlene Foster’s favourites? No, Virginia, the answer is not ‘knife’ and ‘Nigel’. Nor, as it happens, “Feckin’ blonde”.  No, Arlene’s two words which she has taken to rolling off her ruby-red lips on public occasions are “rational” and […]

There’s a serious row going on between the EU and the people who produce the Astrazeneca vaccine. The EU says they promised to deliver X millions of the Covid vaccine and have not done that. Meanwhile, Michael Gove is happy that the UK is doing so much better in rolling out the vaccine. Is he […]

So  – were you in favour of the Good Friday Agreement? And if you were, how did you feel about Articles 2 and 3 in the Irish Constitution being radically amended, so that they no longer laid claim to all of the island of Ireland, but settled for a desire for peaceful political reunification of […]

I’ll plead old age and  the loss of short term memory and pretend I don’t know the name of the pundit who recently wrote – “Nationalists who had sought from 1870 to have a measure of Home Rule for Ireland, rejected the 1920 Act. The cheering crowds which  had filled O’Connell Street in 1912 in […]

Mairead Corrigan Maguire submitted a letter to the American Consulate in Belfast on Tuesday, January 26, 2021. In her communique, she encourages the new President of America, Mr Joe Biden, a Democrat, to free Julian Assange and help end the war on Yemen. America stands accused of prolonging the conflict by continuing to supply arms […]

Ian Paisley Jr was on The Claire Byrne Show  last night, and if there’s a unionist politician more devoid of charm than Ian Óg, I wonder where s/he is.  Ian was asked about the idea of combatting Covid-19 on an all-island basis, so naturally he answered by way of telling the south that they were […]

In 1966 Garret tFitzgerald, then a Senator wrote an article for the Economist, a British magazine regarded as serious, for the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Garrett’s father, Desmond Fitzgerald, had fought in the GPO, had been elected to the First Dail Eireann, had been responsible for its publicity and edited THE IRISH BULLETIN and […]

 “It’s a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”, so declared James Craig/Lord Craigavon in April 1934. As far as Craig and the Unionist party and the Orange order was concerned political Protestantism ruled in the six county statelet. Others, especially those of the large Catholic denomination, were considered ‘enemies of the state’ and were treated as such. […]