Being at Westminster, making a difference?

  An interesting issue in this Westminster election is, what difference do we make? Or more exactly, what difference will our elected MPs make? The DUP has been emitting loud noises about how influential they will be in a hung parliament. That strikes me as a dangerous thing to say. If the parliament is hung in […]

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Like Oliver, the DUP wants more

I was on BBC Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster’s Talkback yesterday discussing the latest DUP kite. No, sorry, that should have been ‘initiative’. As Liam Clarke pointed out in the front-page story of the Belfast Telegraph, the DUP plans to press for, among other things, legislation that would “protect the right to march” and limit the ability […]

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Fifty years from now?

I’ve just listened to a report on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. It dealt with politics here and for the umpteenth time I heard presenter and those vox pop-ed declare that they had no one to vote for, the old politics was sectarian, it was all about what religion you were. I think it’s time […]

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ONLY A POOR HOBO by Harry McAvinchey

    Tramps, hoboes, bums, gentlemen of the road….I suppose it starts right there. The differences in perspectives.  I always thought of the “tramps” of the highway as the good guys in the story .Sure , they might  be poor, smelly  and ragged .They might be down on their luck in some way .They  might […]

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Roberta McNally, David Simpson, Catherine Seeley and two people

First person: Have you heard? Roberta McNally has declared that Catherine Seeley, the Sinn Féin candidate for Upper Bann, is a tramp. She’s also spoken of the nationalist/republican population of that area as ‘taigs’. Second person: And your point is? Roberta McNally isn’t even a DUP member. First person:  True. But she did sign the […]

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‘Save me a Seat Beside You’ by Randall Stephen Hall

    AUDIO LINK. Just click the audio link or cut and paste it into your web browser. Thanks. https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/save-me-a-seat-beside-you-7415   Ever since I was a wee boy I have found trains a comforting thing for they will take you somewhere, with a whole group of strangers. In a sense they are no longer cutting […]

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The Indo and child soldiers

The Irish Independent  has been getting into  a moral lather of late about ‘child soldiers’.  It is expressing its horror that as many as nineteen republican ‘child soldiers’ died during the years of conflict here. Closer reading reveals that most were killed by the accidental discharge of guns or bombs and six were shot dead […]

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THE JUDAS KISS by Harry McAvinchey

In the 1960s my first art instructor was a  very good  local painter called Hugh Largey, who gave me some idea as to what was possible.. The first thing he asked me to read was a book called from “Giotto to Cezanne” by Michael Levey, a distinguished supporter of the Humanist  Association,  who had also  […]

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Book review: ‘West Belfast’ by Danny Morrison

Danny Morrison, West Belfast . Elsinore Press, 2014 (First published 1989) Despite living in and around Belfast for some thirty-five years, I find the city difficult to identify with. “Where are you from?” is more likely to get “Omagh” than “Belfast” from me. So I depend for my sense of Belfast on writers. Two spring […]

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