Although THE BELFAST NEWSLETTER was founded in 1737 and has been a daily paper since 1855, I can’t recall ever reading it. Nor hearing it quoted on the radio or seeing it quoted in any other papers. I can’t think of any writer whose fame extended beyond Belfast, who cut his literary teeth in its […]
April, 2016
Fear and loathing in the Irish media
A week or two I read about this address by Gemma O’Doherty on the state of the Irish media. (I’m hoping I haven’t blogged on it already.) But the fact that Roy Greenslade in the Guardian reports her words in the favourable way he does testifies to the worth of her thinking. I don’t agree with everything […]
What unites Dee Fennell, Colin Duffy and unionist politicians?
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, the song tells us. Neither, it appears, is the lot of a ‘dissident’ republican. For example, in the wake of the killing of Michael McKibbon, Dee Fennell, a spokesman for the Greater Ardoyne Residents Collective (GARC), was arrested. He was taken into custody on Sunday and released […]
Micheál gets/goes mad
Has Micheál Martin gone mad? The answer is definitely Yes, if you mean has he gone ballistic. But if you mean has he gone insane…well, maybe you should judge for yourself. The leader of Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny) was speaking at the Fianna Fail commemoration of 1916 at Arbour Hill yesterday. He claims the Shinners are […]
The Blueshirts and the SoDs just go on circling each other
They’re less like two big beasts and more like two cartoon heavyweights, all scars and patched-up wounds from old battles, circling each other, terrified of being caught by a sucker punch, hoping against hope they can get out of this looking good. With Fine Gael, it’s personal. Enda, the simple primary school teacher from Mayo, is hoping […]
‘ 1916 – 2016 The North King Street Massacre: A Community Remembers’
(This article is from the Stoneybatter & Smithfield People’s History Project on Facebook) On 28th and 29th April 1916 the South Staffordshire regiment of the British army went on a murderous rampage through the working class neighbourhood of North King Street. The community was terrorised and sixteen civilian men and boys were murdered, many […]
The Panama Papers and being good
When you’re filling out your income tax, do you hunt through and bite your pen as you try to find new ways in which you can pay more tax? Mmm – I thought not. Same as myself. We may approve of income tax and tax generally as Good Things, but we take as much care […]
BREXIT and Irony
The Brexit debate has begun to hot up throughout Britain, and a good example was on display last Thursday on the BBC’s Question Time. Those on the panel arguing for a British withdrawal from Europe included the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, the Greens’ Baroness Jones and Dia Chakravarty of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. They were far from alone. The […]
‘McCann’s the Man’ by John Patton
The LibDem vote crumbled; the SNP want all of the YES votes as well as from those whose minds have been changed since the Referendum; the Tories believe that the Labour vote is vulnerable; you should not split the Unionist vote . Psephologists and journalists often assume, for convenience sake, that blocks of votes belong […]
Stephen Fearon: Is it stupidity or something else?
Is it stupidity, or arrogance, or simple nastiness that makes an official of Fianna Fail (the Republican Party) post a tweet like this? It will be interesting to see if the leader of FF will publicly disown this troglodyte… .https://www.facebook.com/laurence.mckeown.9/posts/10209134356706651