December, 2021

A close family relative lived in the front room of her parents’ small terraced house with her husband and two children for the first four years  of marriage. She could not get a house in Derry although a new Corporation housing estate was being built about  a mile from where she was sharing hopelessly cramped […]

As Lord Frost departed his post to be replaced by Liz Truss, I thought yet again of the impact of appearance in politics (and in most other walks of life, come to that). Frost was a beefy, broad-faced man, the kind of guy who could take care of himself in a Friday night punch-up outside […]

So -it’ll be a Frost-free Christmas and New Year – the good Lord Frost has handed in his resignation, not (he says) because he was getting nowhere with the protocol, but because low taxation and fewer laws weren’t as low and as few as he’d have liked. Can you believe it? Liz Truss will take […]

This TV review was first published in the Andersonstown News CHANNEL FOUR NEWS  usually runs for a full hour, but on Friday nights it stops after half-an-hour, and lets DISPATCHES take over. Last Friday DISPATCHES investigated ‘drug wars’, In particular the Pfizer vaccine. The Pfizer is a powerful  vaccine that comes at a powerful price: […]

The real losers in the Julian Assange case are Julian Assange, his family, freedom of the press, truth and justice. Britain has decided to grant America’s appeal, to have Julian Assange extradited to face 175 years in a deep dark windowless dungeon, in isolation, in the most inhospitable hole in the ground the American penal […]

Christmas morning. A majestic rendering of ‘The Sash’ fills the air as the lights come up. The room is empty but the table groans with Christmas fare – plump turkey, lashings of ham, expensive wine, plum pudding, alcohol-laced trifle and a huge box of chocolates. The door opens and Sir Jeffrey Donaldson enters.  He sits […]

So the hooded men have finally achieved justice – or maybe not. Why did it take so long for the British legal system to admit to what they’d done and declare it torture? And even more important, maybe – who in the PSNI made the ‘irrational’ decision to stop the case of the hooded men? […]

A day or two ago I listened to General Francis Richard Dannatt, Baron Dannatt, GCB, CBE, MC DL on Talkback.  He was explaining to the show’s presenter how the ‘hooded men’ were subjected ‘interrogation tactics’. It might be called torture now but that’s not what it was called then.  All right,  the Supreme Court may […]

On 12 December 65 years ago the IRA launched 12 coordinated attacks across the Six Counties. They say that you are out of the world if you are out of the fashion. And violence was fashionable in the world at the time. The Brits and the French and the Israelis conspired together to attack Egypt. […]

This TV Review first appeared in The Andersonstown News ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS (RTÉONE) has a nice blockbuster sound to it, the kind of documentary series that would come loaded with big insights. Not so. Patricia Scanlan is an Irish writer who ‘adores’ writing, and in last week’s episode she remembers when she met ‘the magnificent Maeve Binchy’. She was ‘excited and […]