August, 2017

  Recently, a Sunday paper, the Sunday Business Post, carried a feature in their magazine, ‘Envisaging Ireland 20 Years from Today’. They invited eleven people from the world of business, disability, media, politics, and education to respond. The replies were interesting and some were imaginative. For some Automation was going to bring great changes. Work will […]

Impressed with Paul Gallagher’s CV, I decided to google Castleknock College, his alma mater, where he made his disparaging remarks on the 1916 leaders. As he is a Kerryman, I thought he might be a spiritual love child of Bishop Moriarty or a descendant of an  actual love child of the anti-Fenian prelate. Castleknock’s website […]

Let’s start a damp Wednesday with a few dry-as-gunpowder questions.   Do Irish nationalists and republicans admire the various rebellions over the centuries against British rule in Ireland?  Such occasions as the 1798 United Irishmen’s rebellion, the Young Irelanders’ rebellion of 1848, the Easter Rising of 1916? The reasonably safe answer to all of that […]

I’ve just discovered comments by Paul Gallagher reported in the Irish Times of the 17th May and I decided to check his CV before commenting. He’s a relatively young man, born in 1955, and the CV is impressive. He is a former Fianna Fáil Attorney General, a Senior Counsel, a Bencher of the Kings’s Inns, […]

   I have scores of books by or about journalists, acquired secondhand and cheaply. I won’t say I got them for a song, though I imagine I might have had some heavy tomes thrown at me for my musical efforts. As it happens the book “Shooting History -a personal journey” is by a former Chorister, […]

  The Great American Songbook, as most cultural commentators will assert, was largely the product of the Jewish woof in the American warp. One of the notable note-perfect exceptions to this rule of strum and who brought his own, erm, Waspish buzz to the songbook was, of course: -Cole Porter. He was the Wasp who […]

I’ve written before about the Féile an Phobail’s ability to produce speakers and catch public interest, not just through focusing on Irish matters, but on matters well beyond our shores.  I was at one of them last week. A wet coming we had of it. I had a passenger who was in a wheel-chair, and […]

  A couple of years ago I found on Youtube a ten-minute colour film taken in an unspoiled beauty spot praised in Irish verse by Saint Colmcille upwards of fourteen hundred years ago and celebrated in rapturous retrospect by Molly Bloom in the last lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The beauty of the film was […]

    Can the process of canonisation of the eponymous martyr already be in train with the praise heaped upon him by the distinguished historian Ruth Dudley Edwards*? Which puts me in mind of the proverb -“aithnionn ciarog ciarog eile” ?  For Myers himself went over the top with praise of the late Auberon Waugh […]

I’m bemused by Joe Horgan’s sympathy for Kevin Myers, whose paid services at the Sunday Times have been discontinued. Mr Myers is seventy years old. In December 2006 at the age of 65 my employers terminated my employment.  It seems to me that the Sunday Times was very kind to Mr Myers in keeping him […]