June, 2016

I doubt if a Guy or Doll opening THE CORK EXAMINER, THE IRISH INDEPENDENT or THE IRISH PRESS on Monday 4 September 1939 will have learnt that World War II had broken out the previous day. Or opening the New York Times, TIMES of London or Moscow’s papers. But many of them will have read […]

I wonder if Michael Gove was bullied at school. He looks like (and is) a very smart little chap, quick with the verbal response, ready to cap any negative comment thrown his way with a clinching one-liner of his own. I can think of at least one example of such a physically weak/mentally sharp individual […]

  The election of the 43-year-old John F Kennedy to the US Presidency in 1960 was very widely seen as a source of hope. The first President born in the twentieth century was perhaps the only head of government born in that century  outside Cuba. Pope John XXIII, though 36 years his senior, was renewing the Catholic […]

  Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. That is what Google tells me when I search for Northern Ireland. Ok, we know that, it is that division which allowed unionism to misrule, to discriminate and to start a bloody conflict against the Catholic population who felt more Irish than they do.  Since the Good […]

Why are the DUP the only political party that is firmly in favour of BREXIT? Sammy Wilson has been appearing on TV programme after TV programme, ditto Gregory Campbell, and Arlene Foster has been emphatic when the question is put to her: we must get rid of the undemocratic system where unelected people in Europe […]

I quote Gordon Brown, interviewed by John  Humphries on BBC  Radio 4 this morning (June 13). Humphries is a very aggressive interviewer who rarely lets any assertion go unchallenged but he apparently saw no reason to ask Brown for evidence. In fact British Governments had no quarrels with Mussolini for most of the Duce’s ascendancy, […]

When Nelson Mandela first visited Ireland he rattled the humbugs and Pharisees by refusing to condemn the Republicans. He knew, but they didn’t, that Irish Republicans had given training and technical help with the most successful sabotage operation carried out in South Africa. There was some symmetry there, for when Michael Stone murdered three and […]

  The UK used to be a union with Britain and Ireland.  When a majority of Ireland first voted for independence in 1918, the unionist minority refused to accept it through fear of becoming a Protestant minority in a Catholic country where Protestants had historically misruled and mistreated the majority population. Through threat of further […]

If you’re from the north and don’t support the Northern Ireland team, are you a bad person? That’s the essential question that a number of people have been agonizing over in recent days. For some it’s easy: those in the northern team are our fellow-countrymen, so of course we should support them. For others it’s […]

    To Irish nationalists and many Catholics throughout this island, the Loughinisland report will hold no surprises but does mark a key change in attitudes as for the first time in the north anyway, collusion has been proven beyond all doubt in an official state inquiry and that is something new. We shouldn’t be […]