April, 2016

As no doubt you all know George Berkeley, a Kilkenny man who became Church of Ireland Bishop of Cloyne, was a formidable intellectual and philosopher. If I understand his main claim to fame, he held that such things as tables, chairs and brickbats have no objective existence beyond our imagining them. So if a neighbour […]

I hope readers will forgive my laziness. I wrote the piece below as a draft nearly four years ago. I didn’t polish it at all, or send it for publication. I’m sure the usual begrudgers will find faults with it, punctuation, split infinitives perhaps. No “Ad Majorem Britanniae Gloriam” dedication.  Recently the Irish Times reprinted from […]

r  to      It For the next month,  any and every word uttered by a politician must be heard with an added health warning: “It’s the election, stupid”.  Sometimes the words uttered will be a rallying call, urging supporters to rise above past events and enmities. More often, it will be a rallying call, […]

   St. Patrick’s Day in America is never a quiet affair.  There are plenty of political and theological dust-ups, solemn and raucous processions and debates between hallucinatory academics  and jaded journalists.  A fun part of all this is identifying who is carrying the can for England’s agenda and what is missing from all the celebrations.  […]

Some of my favourite writers and journalists were or are British, and perhaps most that I despise are Irish. But I can’t think of many  (off the top of my head anyway) journalists with knighthoods, peerages, OBEs, CBEs or other wages of sin, whom I’d urinate on if they were on fire.Deliberately anyway, for an […]

I seem to have upset a few people on your blog Jude. I would first of all like to apologise to anyone I have offended. I suppose I can be a little hot-headed and my temper has got the better of me. I don’t know about anyone else, but recent events have certainly changed things […]

Do parties put the state/country’s interests above the interests of their particular party? We’ve been famously told that one party did once: the SDLP. According to this version of events, John Hume and Seamus Mallon sacrificed the welfare of their party so that they could bring about peace. Certainly the SDLP has suffered monumentally since the […]

I’ve been thinking that the hare just might be the perfect symbol to reflect the very distinct personality pertaining to the citizenry of the magical land of Norneverland.Given that across the land people are riven with conflicting senses of identity the leperid might provide the adhesive glue to better reflect our innate curmudgeonry complexity ; […]

March 29, 2016 Letters Editor THE INQUIRER 801 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19107   Dear Editor: The views expressed in “In blood of rebels…” and “With its ancient roots, courage of martyrs…” (3/27) on the Easter Rising in Ireland were a welcome surprise when compared to the British propaganda hosted by the New […]

Those of us who read the first few pages of Ulysses may remember how Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus played host in the Martello Tower at Sandycove to a visiting Englishman whom they concluded was a gobshite and, if I recall correctly, a source of beer money. The gobshite had formed the view that England […]