April, 2016

On March 2nd 1985 THE TIMES of London carried an editorial headed “MURDER IS MURDER” which prompted me to write a strong reply. After telephone conversations between the editor and myself, the following watered-down letter was published by him. He, not I, did the watering-down.   Sir, Your meandering leader (March 2) following the devastation […]

How do you like paying taxes?  I’d guess you’re like me: you pay them gladly. If we didn’t, the infrastructure of society would collapse – hospitals, roads, schools – the lot. So when the time comes to fill in our tax forms, or when we look at our pay cheque and see the chunk that’s […]

It’s been said that every tinker has their own way of dancing. And every thinker too, perhaps.  The startling news that in the 1980s an English boy of 17 was a member of the Monday Club struck me as very peculiar. One Monday in February 1960 British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, after a month of […]

April 3, 2016 Editor ASSOCIATED PRESS NY, NY   Dear Editor: Shawn Pogatchnik’s “Ireland Recalls 1916 Easter Rising…” (3/30) and others he has written have an unmistakable bias. Saying “Most Dubliners opposed the insurrection..” is a qualitative phrase without the slightest chance to substantiate as historical fact. The phrase the “predominantly Catholic South…” is inaccurate. […]

Did you catch that RTÉ Prime Time discussion they held in the GPO a week or two ago? David McCullagh talked to a number of pro- and anti-Easter Rising people (Kevin Myers, Michael McDowell, Eamon O Cuiv, Patsy McGarrry, Ruth Dudley Edwards) and while things got heated, mercifully they’d left their guns outside. Two matters, […]

What manner of man is Nigel Dodds? Well, if judged by conventional criteria, he is a very smart man. He studied law at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he got a First Class Honours degree along with several prizes. He’s a qualified barrister and worked for twelve years at the Secretariat of the European Parliament. […]

So what did I miss while I’ve been away? On Easter Sunday around about midday I was tooling down the near-clear motorway, airport -bound, while in Dublin there was a veritable stew of marching and half-hearted speechifying about a history that no-one can agree on. There was a fractured conversation as to the why and […]

I know Patsy McGarry, the Religious Affairs Correspondent for the Irish Times. That is to say, I met him once when he was in Belfast, and a more pleasant and sunny-dispositioned man you couldn’t meet. Alas, he’s recently taken to speaking out about the morality of the Easter Rising. Is mor an trua sin – […]

April 3, 2016   Letters Editor ROCKFORD REGISTER STAR 99 E. State Street Rockford, Ill 61104   Dear Editor: This is in response to “Republican Army’s Ghost…” (3/25) which misinformed and misled your readers. But not without purpose. First, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was not denied entry to the White House for a St. […]

  I’m no theologian nor philosopher, nor have I the eminence of a chat show host, disc jockey or punk rocker. So I’ll just voice the modest opinion that the leaders and the men and women of the 1916 Insurrection were imbued with the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. Faith that their compatriots would […]