Author Jude Collins

FACING THE PUBLIC by Donal Kennedy

    If on the Day of Judgement my Divine Judge is as merciful to me as the camera is I’ll have a privileged cloud in Heaven.   It amazes me that professional, even mercenary, correspondents in THE IRISHTIMES choose to show the worst of their many faces to their readers.   One historian presents […]

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Was that Washington gig a win?

So how was the visit of various Irish political parties to Washington, including the DUP, the UUP, Sinn Féin and Alastair McDonnell (his party, we’re told, boycotted the shindig) – was their journey fruitful?   No and yes. No, in that not a word or a half-syllable of what they said will deter Joe Biden […]

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THE WORLD AND IRELAND SINCE 1918 Part One by Donal Kennedy.

  There were no elections or plebiscites in Palestine nor other territories seized by the British and French during the Great War, nor in those seized  from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Invented “nations”  Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have fallen apart more than once and the Britain’s  purported justification  for involvement in the war “the self-determination of nations” […]

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Charlie Bird, boy and man

Charlie Bird, the former RTÉ journalist, died yesterday. I knew him in 1966-67 and then again, very briefly, in 2011. In 1966-67, I taught in a Dublin school called Sandymount High School. Charlie was one of my students, and I can say without fear of contradiction that he was one of the weakest students I […]

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Frank Hester: he has a way with words. And money

Frank Hester has a lot pf money. That’s why he gave £10 million to the Tory party. Needless to say, none of the Tories thought Frank was any other than a loaded boy scout, honourable and upright and rich. In their exclusive clubs, if someone raised Frank’s name in the same sentence as racist,  the […]

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Scappaticci and the dirty war

There are reasons why the public want to have the Freddie Scappatici story revealed in full, and many reasons why the British government want many aspects of it to remain under wraps. But the most anxious to hear the full truth are the families of those killed by Scapattici’s ‘nutting squad’. The period of the […]

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Living by Our Values by Richard Rohr and Randy Woodley

  Randy Woodley points to the values that have been essential to Indigenous wisdom:   Why would human beings promote systems, structures, ideologies, and lifestyles that work against their own survival? Good air quality is also a medicine. So is clean water. And healthy soil. Even a stress-free life is known to prolong people’s lives. […]

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