March, 2016

In the past few days I’ve done a blog for Francis Teeney’s Mindfields blogsite and a radio discussion with Ruth Dudley Edwards on the question of how we handle the past – in this case not our own unhappy post-conflict past,  but the past of the British Empire. More specifically, the question was asked: should […]

It is a truth universally acknowledged ,( isn’t it? ), that British rule was so popular in Ireland at Easter 1916, that, had British troops handed their rifles and bayonets to Irish civilians, those civilians would have massacred the disarmed “rebels” and saved General Maxwell’s firing squads having to getting out of bed in the […]

Sometimes you get shocked into a realization of how old you are by something unexpected. That happened for me last Friday when I read an editorial in the Belfast Telegraph, about which more anon. I was shocked because I can remember a time, back in the mist, when the Belfast Telegraph could claim to be a […]

  OK, class, pay attention. By way of intro, a bit of an oul’ pome. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” Despite this, in just under […]

  So the feverish scramble for Dail seats has at last begun to subside,  and as the dust settles, the prophets and sooth-sayers come crowding round to examine the cooked goose’s innards for signs of things to come. Given the total hames these same ball-gazers made of tell us how things would pan out in […]

Considering Lord Brookborough’s long career it’s strange that nobody seems to have written his biography nor has he left us a memoir. Captain Terence O’Neill wrote a memoir devoid of weight and wit, Brian Faulkner one with a make-weight title -“Memoirs of a Statesman.”   So I’ve had to see what scraps I could dig […]

Years before the outbreak of the First World War the British Government had established the Official Secrets Act, MI5 and MI6 and on 8 August 1914 Parliament passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). Imperialist propaganda which had long predated the war took on a new savagery. Rudyard Kipling wrote a story whose heroine […]

Dr John Coulter has posted a blog on the QUB website Political Mindfields, which is master-minded by Dr Francis Teeney.  It urges the formation of an Irish Christian Party, north and south. You can read the blog at  http://blogs.qub.ac.uk/politicalmindfields/2016/02/24/christian-politics-a-force-for-good/ I wrote the following blog in response to Dr Coulter’s. Since I plan to be debating the idea […]

    “After the uprising of the 17th June  The Secretary of the Writers’ Union   Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee   Stating that the people   Had lost the confidence of the government   And could win it back only   By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier   In that case for […]

Wouldn’t you know it? …If a new way of screwing up life in Norneverland could be found, our dithering politicians would find it and sit on their hands. They can’t find the time or the money to make a feasability study and re-instate a train line to the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland . Yes , […]