February, 2016

Is David Kearns of the Indo  ignorant or devious? Hard to say. Under the heading  ” ‘Let’s take one election at a time, sweet Jesus’ – Tempers flare as Gerry Adams is asked about running after next Dáil”, Kearns says that the Sinn Féin President “appeared to lose his cool” when asked if this election […]

I have frequently heard the misconstrued sentiment, that the fighting during Easter week, 1916 was an engagement wholly between Irish rebels and English soldiers. This viewpoint is somewhat counterfactual and credulous. Thousands of British soldiers who served in the streets of Dublin, fighting against Irishmen, who had seized various garrisons across the city, were in […]

Right – that’s it. The last opinion poll is in, so looking at them all we can conclude decisively where each party stands in the minds and hearts of the electorate. So let’s scrap Friday – it’s enormously expensive holding an election. Let’s just give parties and independents their percentage of representatives in the Dail […]

  The things that you’re liable to read in the …………………..Newspapers of Record. Not even when the newspaper in question is the Irish Times. Nor its feature “An Irishman’s Diary” ” when its guest diarist is John Horgan. John Horgan’s journalistic career dates back to 1962. He has sat in Seanad Eireann, been elected to […]

Is there a partitionist mentality in the south of Ireland? One’s first reaction is to say No. After all, for decades the south had Articles 2 and 3 in its Constitution, which claimed that the whole island of Ireland formed the national territory. Granted, 2 and 3 were amended in the Good Friday Agreement,  and […]

     The laughable assertion  by Ruth Dudley Edwards that the 1916 Insurgents ushered in a century of bloodshed in Ireland prompts me to wonder how many wars and warlike campaigns have been waged by the United Kingdom, by France and by the United States in the same period. I think perhaps a Mathematical Genius […]

  I see that at an auction of items of Irish interest held recently in New York the medals given a torturer named Captain Kelly fetched a high price. Captain Kelly had won medals in the Great War and in 1920  won a further, special medal, for  Intelligence Services in Ireland.He was based in Victoria Barracks, […]

A detailed look by Daniel Collins at how the BBC reports foreign affairs https://danieldcollins.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/the-bbcs-russophobic-bias/

“In John Edward Healy, whose death we announce with deep regret today, Ireland has lost the greatest of her journalists and a citizen she can but ill spare.” That’s how THE TIMES of London, on 31 May 1934, saluted the man who had been Editor of THE IRISH TIMES from 1907 until his death.  “Ireland […]