December, 2016

During the final days before the election, I had a discussion which turned into a heated debate with one of my older American friends. She was and remains a devoted supporter and apologist for Hillary Clinton, so I imagine the result hasn’t fully sank in yet. I on the other hand, come from the young […]

Pat Kenny hosted John Banville as guest on his DOB-funded Newstalk fm show yesterday. P and J discussed constructions from the architectural legacy of Dublin to the linguistic construction of Hiberno-English, that sorta thingy.   About both topics P and J were in such accord as to be virtually  welded into the one entity: PJ. PK:         […]

Following the BALLOT ACT of 1872 there were eleven  General Elections in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland before Westminster’s Better Government of Ireland Act was passed in 1920. Previous to the Ballot  Act, voting was not secret and pressure and bribery were used  openly to influence the voters. I’m neither a psephologist nor […]

When Sinn Féin first went into power-sharing with unionists, Gerry Adams warned them it would be “a battle a day.” He was wrong. The battles haven’t been on a daily basis. But over the decades, it’s been a simmering distaste served on a daily basis. You might say “Unionists had reason and more for their […]

.   Just as there is the concept of The Fruit Gum Border and the Fruit Pastille Border, Esteemed Blogmeister, so also is there the concept of the FG treatment and the FP treatment by RTE when it comes to politicians from north of the Black Sow’s Border. The Hard Treatment, the Soft Treatment We […]

The late John Montague, who died yesterday, wrote this short poem entitled ‘Hunger striker’ shortly after the death of Bobby Sands in 1981: This is a song of silence This is the sound of the bone Breaking through the skin Of a slowly dying man. This is the song of his death. This is the […]

Phillip Knightley, an acclaimed journalist and the author of a book on war correspondents –The First Casualty –  died recently and had a full page Obituary in THE TIMES. Its first paragraph I found ironic: “It was said that if a libel writ had not landed on his desk by Tuesday, Harold Evans, the Sunday Times […]

  Form and content, style and substance – it’s mind-buckling how often we get the two mixed up, or allow others to mix them up for us. Take Arlene Foster. As you’ll know if you haven’t been living in an igloo in Canada’s Northern Territories, our First Minister has been under pressure to justify the […]

By any standards the relentless personalised attacks on Sinn Féin, and in particular its leader Gerry Adams, regarding the killings of prison officer Brian Stack in 1983 and Jean McConville in 1972, and the alleged rape of Mairia Cahill in 1997, are bitter and incorrigible attacks on democracy. The sheer level of malice, prejudice and […]

I never really understood how after the war of independence, we allowed ourselves to turn on one another to the extent of a vicious and bitter civil war, the divisions of which are still very much raw today almost a century on. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail were unable to bring themselves to go into […]