February, 2021

Interviewed on RTÉ Radio recently, smoky Irish blues singer, Mary Coughlan, revealed that music streaming service Spotify had paid her £39 in royalties for the year 2019. The singer got about £0.01 per play.   The music business has always been hard-nosed and the casualty list of once young and talented enthusiasts is an extended one. […]

I have no idea who the buck eejits were that congregated in Dublin yesterday to express their outrage over people being vaccinated and the idea that people might be asked to maintain social distancing and mask wearing. Maybe these buck eejits have access to information I have not, indicating that Micheál and Leo are drugging […]

This TV review first appeared in the Andersonstown News All sorts of strange stuff happens to your TV viewing habits during lockdown. These days, when house-imprisonment becomes a bit heavy, I head to SKY ONE and watch The Simpsons. SKY ONE offers  a double and sometimes a treble dose of them, one after the other. The Simpsons has been going since the late […]

Derry-Strabane is one of the most impoverished areas in the UK – yet it has had John Hume, Mark Durkan and Martin McGuinness representing it.  Have they done a good job for their electorate? And finally, drugs. Yummy-yummy. No, seriously – should drugs be legalised and government controlled? The War Against Drugs has been raging […]

To say Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon are not best mates right now would be to state the obvious. Salmond was tried  in March 2020 on 14 charges of sexual assault, including one attempted rape, involving 10 women. Some of the complainants were Scottish National Party (SNP) officials, others worked for the Scottish government. He […]

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right. This was the rallying war cry of political unionism and its armed supporters in loyalist paramilitaries during the partition of Ireland in the early 20th century. There have been many similar invocations of this settler colonial mindset throughout Irish history, together with a veto on progress within […]

It would be unfair to describe Michael McDowell as a failed politician.  He was one of those who founded the Progressive Democrats in the 1980s; he got elected to the Dáil several times; but in the 2007 general election he led his party to near-complete wipe-out, losing his own seat as well as virtually all […]

Fianna Fail TDs willing to speak to Sinn Féin: Jim O’Callaghan/Barry Cowen/John Lahart/Joe Flaherty/James Browne James Lawless/Marc MacSharry/Paul McAuliffe/James O’Connor/Willie O’DeaPadraig O’Sullivan/Niamh Smyth/Robert Troy/Cathal Crowe/John McGuinness I would commend the Fianna Fail Fifteen for declaring their willingness to exploring the possibility of FF engaging with SF in talks about the formation of a future government. That is surely a more democratic approach than refusing to talk […]

Erik Mustad, University of Agder After the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, party politics in Northern Ireland has mainly focused on power sharing. However, with a changed political landscape and the two large Westminster parties looking more to the nations, perhaps the Northern Irish parties ought to matter more in Westminster. In post Devolution Northern Ireland focus […]

Has the UK just produced the first fruits of freedom? Its vaccination  rate far outstrips that of the EU. What’s going on? Arlene Foster says that unionist will take a legal case against the Irish  protocol, saying it drives a “coach and horses” through the Act of Union and the Good Friday Agreement. Will she win over Boris,  who did the dirty deed? Finally, is the Scottish independence movement about to be holed  below the waterline? Nicola Sturgeon has been accused of lying in  parliament about the Alex Salmond matter. Salmond was charged with all sorts of sexual misdeeds but has emerged vindicated.  Is this the  famous split that will damage the SNP in the May general election? You know where the answer lies. The hand of enlightenment is on your shoulder. Press the button below…