December, 2014

I was wondering if a hunger strike might work in relation to Twaddell Roundabout . You’d never know until you tried, would you?There’s not much written  about  that whole situation in the mainstream press , but the assumption is that there is a cadre of  men  trapped like North Pole explorers in their tent awaiting […]

I don’t know Professor Peter Shirlow’s politics, other than the odd statement I’ve happened to catch in passing. But he said something the other day that struck me as interesting, not to say ironic.  He was talking about the fiasco of the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach who came to Stormont as two honest brokers […]

“There are countries so underdeveloped today that the gift of independence is like the gift of a razor to a child”  – Lord Beaverbrook. Yesterday I came across the above quotation in a panel discussion on Canadian TV , filmed in the late 1950s. It featured Brendan Behan who not surprisingly rejected Beaverbrook’s  smug assertion. Less surprisingly an […]

  Are the talks over already? i think the Prime Minister has left the building holding his tattered chequebook  tightly to his breast. Nine weeks  of “talking” they said . I wonder how many minutes of “talking” there actually  were in those nine weeks.Nine weeks is a fairly large wedge of time .You could possibly […]

Imagine taking £13,000,000 sterling and taking it to a treasure island like a latter-day Long John Silver . Then imagine  digging a series of  holes throughout the island and burying pots of the divided bullion in holes  all over the land  and mapping it all out carefully .Imagine then , boarding your ship, sailing away… […]

No white smoke, then, at the time of writing. Enda Kenny is probably in the shower at this point, singing lusty versions of ‘The Broad Black Brimmer’ or maybe ‘Take It Down From the Mast, Irish Traitor’.  David Cameron, eager to get home, is probably on his second round of toast and thinking (though  not […]

You wait for months and then two come along. In the south, the government tried to talk down the mass demonstration against water charges; in the north, the governments (British and Irish) tried to talk up the arrival of David Cameron and Enda Kenny in town, to help broker an agreement on flags, parades and […]

The Solar Panels have finally arrived .There… I’ve said it. You might recall that I mentioned them some time back in the Summertime…. July? Was it? Anyway ,there have been a few false starts since then which left me wondering if my initial scepticism wasn’t unwarranted. I made reference to Santa Claus and his undoubted […]

  So – this is the day.  Der Tag, the Germans call it. The day when the people of the south will find out whether they hold real power or whether they gave it away when they listened to Fine Gael  and Labour promises and voted the present government in. Paul Murphy TD,  a leading […]

There should be a law. Groucho Marx didn’t say that but then he had good judgement:  “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”. It’s a pity his life couldn’t have intersected with Sinead O’Connor’s. He could have had a word in her perfectly-formed ear. Maybe Fine Gael […]