Viva Dick!

The aptly-named Dick Roche was on television yesterday. Dick is a well-padded man, an Irish cabinet minister and he was talking about a young Irishman who’d been shot dead in Bolivia. The authorities there say the young man was part of a group intent on assassinating the country’s president, Evo Morales. Dick in contrast said […]

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Older and Bolder

I spent yesterday talking to four people, three of whom I had last seen when they and I were seventeen years old. I’m doing a series of interviews with people (I almost said ‘boys’) who left St Columb’s College, Derry (yes, that’s right – the only school in the world to have produced two Nobel […]

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Older and Bolder

I spent yesterday talking to four people, three of whom I had last seen when they and I were seventeen years old. I’m doing a series of interviews with people (I almost said ‘boys’) who left St Columb’s College, Derry (yes, that’s right – the only school in the world to have produced two Nobel […]

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Dumb Irish

This is my first blog and I don’t even know if I should dip my toe in the bloggy waters, but a cartoon in The Irish Times the other day gave me such a pain in the bum, I need to vent my spleen somewhere. It showed a great oafish balaclava-ed figure peeling an Elastoplast […]

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Dumb Irish

This is my first blog and I don’t even know if I should dip my toe in the bloggy waters, but a cartoon in The Irish Times the other day gave me such a pain in the bum, I need to vent my spleen somewhere. It showed a great oafish balaclava-ed figure peeling an Elastoplast […]

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Ruth and the good Lord

It’s an odd sensation, to know you’ve brushed up against greatness. My experience of that was to have been in the same History class at University College Dublin (UCD) as Ruth Dudley Edwards in the early-1960s. Ruth then was a frumpy little thing with not much to say for herself other than that her boyfriend […]

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Waking and Sleeping

“Early to bed/Early to rise/Makes a man healthy, wealthy, witty and wise”. My father liked to quote that old saw, and at the time – when I was in my teens and early twenties – it struck me as both boring and false. These days, about fifty years later, I’m much less sure. By the […]

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Ruth and the good Lord

It’s an odd sensation, to know you’ve brushed up against greatness. My experience of that was to have been in the same History class at University College Dublin (UCD) as Ruth Dudley Edwards in the early-1960s. Ruth then was a frumpy little thing with not much to say for herself other than that her boyfriend […]

Continue Reading