Author Harry McAvinchey

Does anyone miss Stormont? If you believed the media…”The Meedja”…. you might feel that you were at sixes and sevens about the lack of local government. I mean …maybe you really are very agitated about the whole scenario that has developed since the RHI scandal and its following shoal of lesser scandals capsized the government […]

You’ve sometimes got to laugh at the the wee grunty sounds that issue from the mouths of us humans . For the vast empty deserts of radio , if there is no new political news, the programmers and presenters panic as to what to discuss.Today , because of the inertia in setting up a local […]

I’m not sure….but I’m almost certain that I have never before come across a man such as our current Secretary Of State ,Mr James Brokenshire ,who could talk with such great facility for long minutes…possibly hours on end , like a practised filibuster and actually say very little at all.It is a skill that most […]

Ah! Direct Rule is in the news again.Nobody likes to talk about it too much, of course.The politicians at Westminster would rather hold their own feet to the fire than start that kind of thing up again, so they are hoping beyond hope that those Norneverlanders will cobble together some sort of compromise and take […]

Outside much seems the same. The first sharp green shoots of goldenrod have poked through the clatter of their still, dead, rusting predecessors ;those exotically cultured tulip bulbs I’d brought back from Amsterdam last summer, seem to have found life in the heavy clayey soil of Ireland and are now opening their mad petals to […]

The day started with something of a sharp two-edged blade….like one of those old-fashioned Gillettes we used before the shaving market was saturated with highly-priced multi-bladed gimmicks…This was a sword that cut in two distinct ways.The dull buff-coloured envelope poking half-way through the letterbox, told its own tale ; that same kind of paper-stock, in […]

Now that every Irish person is to be allowed to vote for the future President of Ireland, already Tom Elliot the Ulster Unionist MP wants to make it difficult for them , even though he too has every right to vote.It is hardly credible.The anamoly has always been that any Irish person could stand and […]

So what exactly is this curious border that divides the Irish island for and why is it there at all? The Irish border really is the oddest thing in terms of international boundaries.You might say that it is atypical ; a deviant creation in many respects and on a world-scale something of a unique oddity […]

I had already written a piece , but having left it to scratch through the papers, I turned to find that the computer had decided to exit “sleep” mode , re-boot and update before I had a chance to save it , so I lost it all to the mad cosmic whirl of the universe. […]