November, 2014

I didn’t really watch the Dail clips on the RTÉ news with the attention they deserved but I did pick up bits of it. Somebody said something about asking Gerry Adams  to ‘call off the dogs’ and somebody else – or maybe the same person – made a similar appeal to Adams about  his ‘keyboard […]

  A ton of golden gravel. There it was sitting like some baleful monument, wrapped in its white bag waiting for the next move .I took delivery of it just before the rain came down . It’ll have to be barrowed and wheeled around the house to the bottom of the back garden. I’m sorting […]

I imagine the DUP are not normally close followers of events in the Dail but a number of them may be listening attentively for reports from there today. That’s because there’s to be a debate into…well into how republicans in the north acted around thirty or forty years ago. They’ll be hoping against hope that […]

  Old Crooked Mouth Gregory Campbell is on the  radio rattling on about the” Bloody Sunday” murders of 1972,  as the rain hoses down. You ‘d really wonder  that people cannot see the transparency of his weekly pre-election rants.Last week it was the language issue… He appears now  to be against the families pursuing legal […]

I’m still in shock. Can you imagine anything more inappropriate? It’s a bit like that time Prince Harry went to a fancy dress thing wearing a Nazi uniform. Not funny. That kind of thing could get the Royal family a bad name, associating them with German Nazis. Whereas in fact the Royal family have always shunned […]

In the past I have blogged on Mike Nesbitt, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, including one blog which I titled ‘Is Mike Nesbitt mad?’ When I met him at an event for young Ulster Unionists he stressed that he wasn’t and I agreed he seemed  at the time reasonable sane. And I felt cheered further […]

What does it mean to be British or Irish in the 21st Century?Many people get hung up , if you’ll pardon the reference , with flags and their various representative designs and colours. They use them as identifying signifiers. Of course  many of us would never dream of buying a flag, much less hanging the […]

I see where the Deputy Mayor of Craigavon, Catherine Seeley, will not be taking part in official commemoration ceremonies today. This despite the fact that her grandfather was in the RAF and represented the British combined forces in a number of sports, that her great uncle was awarded the Cross of St George and was […]

Some four or five Christmases ago, for a change,  myself and the family took off to spend the holiday season in the  the North African sunshine of Marrakech, with  further jaunts into the Atlas Mountains  in four- by- four jeeps. It was quite a cultural change from the “Well here it is Merry Christmas” of […]