August, 2021

There were 40,000 in Croke Park yesterday to see the All-Ireland Hurling Final. Great game, but how come 40,000 can gather there yet a few hundred aren’t allowed at a concert? Will mixed messaging be the political death of Micheál Martin? The three candidates running to lead the big trade union Unite are concerned about […]

This blog first appeared as a TV Review in the Andersonstown News Coverage of the Tokyo Olympics sliced into the TV scheduling on most channels, notably BBC and RTÉ. I’m not in a position to comment on the RTÉ coverage, because any time I tried to get it I was informed this was not available where I lived. And so I was driven to consume on […]

Heather Humphreys, acting Minister for Justice in the south, was to have spoken at the annual  Béal na mBláth commemoration this year. What with Covid doing things it wasn’t supposed to do, she had to deliver her speech online. After you’ve read even a few sentences from it, you realise that an evil spirit has […]

This blog first appeared as a column in The Andersonstown News Right – attention at the back there…Now,  how’s your general knowledge? OK then, try this: what was important about Friday two weeks ago? I’ll give you a clue: it was an anniversary. No, not a royal birthday .Still stuck? OK, it was the 76th anniversary of an important event for the Japanese people. On […]

Crimes against Creation are being committed every day resulting in the death and destruction of many species of life, the pollution of our rivers and oceans and the impoverishment of many people. This violence against Creation is now an unending spiral which is out of control. Opportunists and big business exploit the forests and the […]

  By now you’ve had your jab, right? Both your jabs, if necessary. But now it seems that the efficacy of these vaccinations weakens with time, and there’s talk of a third jab. How much at risk are we going to be, going (as they say) forward? Afghanistan – for some of us, those pictures […]

Vulture funds. In Ireland today in the South and increasingly now in the North the cost of renting a place to live is becoming prohibitive. In an unregulated, market led, free for all housing sector, the price of owning your own home is sky rocketing in parallel with the cost of renting somewhere to live […]

Never on a Sunday, they say. Well, this Sunday is different. There is a controversy being engaged in via the Letters page of the  Irish Times. Proinsias de Rossa, a former Workers’ Party politician, has written a letter chiding those who would seek a border poll.                Professor Colin Harvey has written in, disagreeing, as […]

This blog first appeared as a column in The Andersonstown News Sometimes  you get tired of the pussy-footing. In the pages of one southern newspaper in recent weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion of “the obsession” the Irish have with the British. All of the people writing on the topic, whether columnists or letter-to-the-editor writers, have to a greater or lesser extent rolled their […]

Pic 1 Pic 2 Looking south by south west  from the Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal in  Dodge City aka DUPlin, on one’s right hand used to stand  Fatima Mansions before they were demolished in 2006. The Fatima in question had nothing at all  under the toenail of a crescent moon to do with the daughter […]