March, 2016

For nearly sixty years the pubs in Ireland were closed on St Patrick’s Day. The progressive forces  which flowered in 1916 had sufficient influence a dozen years before that to prevail there, although James Larkin’s  ambition of seeing the grass grow over St James’s Gate was never realised.. Ireland sober, Ireland free and prosperous was the general […]

  “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans/ Don’t Let’s be beastly to the Hun…..”   sang Noel Coward, with tongue firmly in cheek. For, love him or hate him, Noel Coward  did have wicked  sense of  fun. I don’t detect any sense of fun in the cringing poltroons responsible for degrading the centenary of […]

I like the DUP’s William Humphrey. The fact that he doesn’t like me is unfortunate but then, not every love is reciprocated. I was on Raidió Uladh/Radio Ulster’s Talk Back yesterday with William, and I got the distinct impression he doesn’t like sharing air-space with me. The subject under discussion was, should the name ‘Windsor […]

I’m chomping down on what can only be described as a marmalade pizza. It’s a fat heel of “Nutty Crust” bread, lightly toasted, every inch of which is slathered in thick -cut “Fruitfield Old Tyme” Seville orange marmalade and full-fat “Golden Cow” butter.I can feel my arteries a-tremble. Toast is one of the pleasures in […]

Some saints you can’t avoid, no matter where you are, and St Patrick is one of them. He’s said to have died on 17 March 460 AD, and pretty well ever since we’ve been celebrating, at least in Ireland. The St Patrick’s Day parade, though, that’s a relatively modern invention – it began in America, […]

As Britain   was imposing internment and the slaughter of Bloody Sunday was only months away,   photos depicting the welcoming of soldiers in Northern Ireland  were rushed to U. S. media outlets.  The Army and MI-5 knew that to  peacefully appease  Catholics with equal rights  would end  colonial rule.  Secret plans of  bombing,  murder and collusion […]

I have heard many callers on phone-in shows telling us all that they are not going to vote this year. The common theme seems to be the disillusionment with politics here in the North. The green and orange politics of old are alive and well and this turns many of us off. They complain that […]

Of all the political commentators, it’s  Fintan O’Toole who brings to mind that quotation in the title. It’s not that he quotes Scripture, or that I’m more learned in it than the average sinner. But O’Toole writes on how to establish a “real Republic” and uses the word “Republic” perhaps more than any other commentator. The […]

BBC Radio 4 recently reported on the  gangland killings in Dublin and consulted one Irish commentator who opined that it was all to do with a (presumably) 800 year tradition of unbroken violence in Ireland. Ms Ruth Dudley Edwards would have the world believe that starting on Easter Monday 1916 there has been an unbroken […]

And so farewell Basil McCrea. The man who was a well-known figure in the UUP, who was the great white hope of the still-born NI21 party, has taken his leave of politics. To say there is no love lost between him and John McCallister, the co-leader of the exNI21 party would be an understatement. I […]