April, 2021

That letter which has been signed by many worthies – Peter Hain, Peter Mandelson, Paul Murphy, Hugh Orde among others – and which urges Boris Johnson to get more involved with the affairs of our own dear stateen: is it important?  In it they urge Johnson “to be honest” with loyalists/unionists about the Protocol. But […]

In October 2020, I received a phone call from my mother.  My dad had tested positive for Covid-19 and I knew there and then that my mother would be Covid positive too as they shared the same house.  At the same time my two sisters tested positive also.  They hadn’t been in contact with each […]

I got this in an email a couple of weeks ago. I think it raises questions around a matter where pain is raw and enforcing un-thought-out rules is difficult. Last week I watched on the webcam the funeral service of a friend in a Catholic church in Derry. It was a most unedifying experience. The coffin and relatives filed into the church and the priest announced that only 25 people could be present. Three times he appealed  for people to leave. He  was […]

It seems we will eventually arrive at a place in these North Eastern six Counties, where we will have to face down people within our own communities who seek to continue a war that no longer exists.  The targeting of a young female part-time PSNI officer and her child this week, with what has been […]

This TV review first appeared in the Andersonstown News It’s funny (peculiar) what people find funny (ha-ha),and you could say it’s also funny (peculiar) how tastes in what’s funny (ha-ha) change with age. There was a good example on Channel 4 last Thursday: FRANK OF IRELAND. It’s a new half-hour series produced by Sharon Horgan’s company – yes, Sharon Horgan who wrote and […]

There will come a point in this failed little statelet, when we as a people must come together and vote for the reunification of the entire island of Ireland.  When I was young, growing up in the beautiful Glens of Antrim, my dad worked on a friend’s farm.  He started early in the morning and […]

“The British must start paying attention to Northern Ireland rather than cynically using it.”  Thus spoke Jonathan Powell who was   former Prime Minister Blair’s advisor during the negotiations resulting in  the 1998 EU-UK Belfast   treaty (aka  the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).  Powell was familiar with the Conservative party’s unwritten policy  of  destabilizing N. I. as required for decades  to justify the deployment of troops,  suspension   of […]

Is there a principled politician in Britain or Ireland? Boris Johnson doing favours for his mate Mr Dyson, David Cameron lobbying for his good mates, Leo Varadkar tipping off friends about the state of medical negotiations – is everybody at it? And if so, does it really matter? The South’s health minister, Stephen Donnelly, says […]

In the US between 2015 and 2020,  police officers were involved in the killing of at least 2775 people. If we extrapolate from that, the figure for police killings of civilians between 2005 and 2020  – 15 years as opposed to 5 – would be well over 12,000 civilian. In the US between 2005 and […]

I don’t normally write two blogs in one day but I find myself compelled to respond to a couple of things on B(ritish)BC’s    Spotlight programme  last night.  1. The personal stories from the early days of our NE stateen came  largely from unionist people. It is of course important that such voices were heard. But the many examples of the murder of nationalists  during the same period were given minimal room.  Anyone looking at the programme would have had no problem in who should be awarded a white hat and who a black one. 2. Even more important: those opinion polls which the  B(ritish)BC conducted on contemporary thinking about NIE and a reunited  Ireland.  Take this one from the B(ritish) BC website today,  reporting on its own programe: “In NI, 49% of people said if there was a border poll today they would vote to remain in the UK, with 43% backing a united Ireland and 8% undecided.” Why do the B(ritish)BC insist on posing questions thus phrased? Maybe because they’re the B(ritish)BC. What am I talking about? The word “today” in “if there was a border poll today”.   First of all, this is obvious fantasy: there will not be a border poll today. And if there were,  a lot of sensible people, myself included, would be  opposed to it.  We all know now – too late – what a con-trick the Brexit referendum was. People literally didn’t know what they were voting for. So who would want to make the same mistake with a  border poll? Why didn’t the B(ritish)BC ask about the desirability of a  border poll within the next five years?  Perhaps because they knew  they mightn’t get the answer they wanted.  A week or two ago, I put up a short video where an American academic shredded a question from a B(ritish)BC Newsnight journalist, because it was framed in a similarly deceptive way. Everyone, but especially  nationalists and republicans, should be on high alert for more such  loaded questions in the coming weeks […]