March, 2016

    Rufty-Roo-Hah! www.ruftyroohah.com An East Antrim based business creating their own books, prints, T-Shirts and greetings cards. All inspired by our life and culture in Northern Ireland. The father and daughter team of Natasha Hall and Stephen Hall have joined forces to celebrate what is special in the north east of the island.  If […]

  The Chancellor has announced a scheme to enable those on low incomes to save and gain a bonus on their investment.  A good thing you might well think, as we all recognise the necessity of providing a little for the future. That it should come from a Tory Government which has consistently punished the poor […]

It’s officially Spring in my world now. There’s always more to life than the shenanigans and witterings of red-faced politicians…. Wednesday 9th of March at about 12.30 post meridiam ,to be exact. That was when my honeybees officially took flight from their hives.I wondered for some weeks now if they had actually survived this long […]

Tony Hancock’s  film “REBEL” was made in 1961. Hancock played a clerk in London, who imagined himself a sculptor in the mould of Rodin, if you’ll forgive the pun. So he puts away his striped trousers, black coat and bowler hat and takes himself off to Paris, adopts a bohemian lifestyle and imagines himself leading the avant garde. […]

Scapegoat. That’s the animal that used to be sent out into the wilderness after the Jewish Chief Priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people on it. It’s a brilliantly simple and striking idea; it’s also a daft and absurdly unjust ritual. What did the poor goat ever do,  to be cast out like that? […]

  Under the heading “Burke, Edmund (1729-97)” the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary says – “English Whig statesman,political and philosophical writer, and orator.” This comes as something of a shock to me.My late mother used  point with pride to the statue of Edmund Burke outside Dublin’s Trinity College, for he was not only our compatriot but kinsman, […]

  Remember that appalling and irrelevant video the Irish Government rolled out to mark the Centenary programme of the Easter Rising? That same video that did not mention the Rising, the executed signatories to the Irish Proclamation and in actual fact, it had nothing at all to do with the Rising? Remember the state commemoration […]

It’s remarkable how commentators, solicitous for the electoral health of Sinn Fein, have advocating its throwing Gerry Adams overboard weighted with cement high-boots. He not only was re-elected in Louth, but his running mate was elected there also, the first woman TD ever in that constituency. In 1910 John Redmond’s candidate had his election declared […]

The newly-elected members of  the Dail are in something of a bind these days. The thrill of having been elected or re-elected has begun to fill a little flat, they’ve stopped congratulating or blaming themselves for their performance during the campaign, and they’re now faced with that trickiest of questions: what next? A newly-buoyant Micheál […]

  OK. Time for thanks, time for appeal. My sincere thanks to all the wonderful and good people who’ve sponsored me for the Omagh Half Marathon, which I’m running to raise funds for Trócaire. Thanks to you we’re at 28% of my target total of £1,000. So with just 15 days left, I’m hoping to […]