December, 2022

OK, let’s get to the heart of it: whose side are you on, Meghan and Harry, or the Royals? You’ll have to choose a side, you know. Pearse Doherty of Sinn Féin made a speech on the Dail recently, listing things like housing, health and education as being in a parlous state.Leo Varadkar got up […]

  It used to make us mad as hell.  Somebody in the class would have done something wrong – written a rude word on the board, stolen a copy book or in some other way acted in defiance of the rules. The teacher would be livid and would call for the offender to own up. […]

This is mid-week, so Pat McArt and myself should not be recording one of our hilarious and yet oddly very very thoughtful meetings. But this week is different, because I have a BOOK just published: BORN ON THE TWELFTH OF JULY: Young and Foolish. We’ve had a launch in Belfast last Saturday, and this coming […]

Lord Loreburn had been Chancellor from 1905 to 1912 and had been kept in the dark. On October 23 1914 Scott dined with him: “He started off directly after dinner to tell me ‘the whole story’ of the relations of the Cabinet to Foreign Policy since he became a member of it…… The crisis came at […]

  Keir Starmer has gone all devolutionary. Which makes a change, since most people felt Labour had developed scant policy other than telling us the Tories were stinkers, which we knew already. Now Starmer and his chums have headlined devolution. The fact that the devolutionary ideas came from a group headed by Gordon Brown might […]

  Last week RTÉ ran a three-part documentary on Sean Quinn, once the richest man in Ireland. Did they explain with sufficiently clarity what happened? Sean Quinn and his wife feel they were shafted, Alan Dukes thinks border people are prone to violence. The World Cup – was that decision about the-ball-over/not over the line […]

I accidentally turned on BBC Radio 4 and overheard a Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngodi Adichie, speak of freedom of expression, which she espouses and censorship which she abhors. Her language was quite ladylike, but she convinced me of her passion for freedom of expression when she said that most people were decent and there were only a […]

Two features “Irish Movie Magic”  and “Padraic Colum: balladeer, poet and cultural mentor, (Dec 3)” set me thinking of a link between Colum and a scene in “The Quiet Man.” Amongst other things. Colum briefly rented a house in 1914 immediately next to the one I was later brought up in on the Hill of […]