December, 2021

I long flattered myself in believing that I  was aware of the great movers and shakers of the modern world but I had never heard of Lucia Hiriart before I read her obituary in THE TIMES  on  24th December 2021. She was not only a  bit-player but a super-bitch player, described by the paper as the “Unapologetic […]

One hundred years ago, when I used to do the ‘What it says in the papers’ slot on Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster, the unspoken rule was that you didn’t comment on the main stories, you just listed which paper said what. At the time it seemed perfectly reasonable; it’s only now that I see how the […]

Maybe we shouldn’t call them ‘conservatives’. Maybe if we called them ‘preservatives’, their political positioning would make more sense. It’s not a position I share, but I can see how some people would be focussed on preserving what they see as the good things in their society, and not allow change that might damage these […]

I first saw the light of day on 28th December 1941 – the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street Dublin My mother used jokingly refer to that location as “Holler” Street. The much older Dublin lying-in Hospital was, by happy coincidence, called the Rotunda. Holy Innocents were being massacred at […]

SPIKED BY THE THE IRISH TIMES FEBRUARY 2013 Subject: Gerry Adams, the Courts, media. the  IRA  & others. Sir, In the over forty years Gerry Adams has been involved in public life, All the Queen’s Horses and All the Queen’s Men have been unable to convince even a non-jury Court that he was, or ever has […]

Jeremy Corbyn the one-time leader of the British Labour Party whose leadership was undermined from within the party by Blairite centrists and without the party by a broad-based attack claiming he was an anti-Semitic, a communist and pro-IRA supporter, the great hero of the left, the hope for a future generation of socialists and left […]

This blog first appeared as a column in The Andersonstown News Many people, mainly unionist but also some nationalists, beg to differ when Gerry Adams says he wasn’t in the IRA. But I don’t know of anyone who would say that Gerry Adams has distanced himself from the IRA. Au contraire: he has always explicitly aligned himself with the IRA. But that’s not enough to […]

A recent  Editorial in THE TIMES of London deplored that Latin America has the wrong sort of voters, the kind who do not appreciate the blessings of liberal economics as imposed by General Pinochet in Chile, for example, and other grisly friends of John Bull and Uncle Sam. The kind of economics, imposed by bayonets […]

We human beings really are an odd species. We spend approximately  364 days each year in division, frequently inflaming that division to the point where we go out and kill each other – or sit in a bunker and get a drone to do our killing for us.  Yet when Christmas wheels around, we go […]

Unlike Sinn Féin, Newton Emerson (‘Sinn Féin rides two horses in chase of hobgoblins’) The Irish Times’s tame unionist has to ride one horse only: the one on which he gallops into Sinn Féin ranks at regular intervals, whip in hand. This morning he is slashing with his riding crop at the Shinners for having […]