January, 2016

At 2.30 pm today, God and the traffic willing, I’ll be starting a Periscope interview with Danny Morrison about his recent article in The Irish Examiner and the two approaching elections. You may want to tune in on your iPhone (you DO have access to an iPhone?) and ask a question or two yourself… See you there…Well, not […]

January 13, 2016 Letters Editor IRISH CENTRAL   Dear Editor: Fr. Murphy’s “Rite and Reason…” (1/12) commentary is thoughtful and thought provoking.    However, several points about the 100th commemoration of the Easter Rising need context. He claims the Easter Rising  was not justified and that the commemorative events planned imply that it was.  No doubt […]

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” said Dr. Johnson. Two hundred or so years later my late father reckoned Johnson got it wrong. He reckoned religion (or a pretence of it) was the last refuge. I suspect though that religion is often the FIRST refuge of scoundrels. It certainly appears to be a […]

Why have unionists  so many jokes about Bobby Sands and the other hunger-strikers? Why are unionist commentators and disaffected republicans so keen to show the hunger-strikers as fools, tricked by Sinn Féin into continuing their strike when they could have stopped? That’s easy. It’s because anti-republicans are very keen to somehow undermine what, by any […]

I read in THE TIMES  (January 12) that  its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is to marry Gerry Hall, ex-wife of Sir Mick Jagger and that David Bowie’s ex-wife had alleged she had found Bowie in bed with Jagger during the former’s sojourn on this planet. All of which might explain the acres of TIMES coverage of Bowie’s […]

  Yet another comment on the blog has got me thinking. This time it was over unionist unity and a single block party forming.  I would at first consider that to be as likely as Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail merging, but on deeper reflection, it made perfect sense. The relationship between Britain and Ireland […]

Enda Kenny appears to be an adept multi-tasker. He has told journalists that though he has the date of the general election in his head, he’s not going to tell them now, but will do it “in a very public fashion” in his own time. I’m taking that to mean he’ll drop the word on […]

I’ve never written about 1966. But that year made such a lasting impression on Ireland’s leading intellectual, Fintan O’Toole, that, when commissioned to write an informed reflection on the 1916 Rising he replied with his recollections of its Golden Jubilee when he was but a lad of eight summers. O’Toole had made no study of the […]

(This piece was first published in THE IRISH POLITICAL REVIEW in January 2012) Two German Officers are the heroes of my story, for they dispel the fog of Military History as it is currently presented in Ireland. The first of these gallant gentlemen, following the defeat of the Kaiser and his own demobilisation, was re-commissioned […]