October, 2018

Pics 1-3 are by Perkin Warbeck    Pic 1: There are buskers and then there are buskers   Pic 2: Donald  Busk.   Pic 3: Alas, even Mozart cannot coax euros from the Bozos who worship Bono. Pics 4-7  are by Matt Collins (No 2 son)   Pic 4  – The Brooklyn Boy – Grandson Gavin   Pic […]

  Looking back on pieces commissioned for the Irish Times to reflect on the 1916 Rising I have been struck with how unqualified many of the respondents have been. I don’t mean that they lacked university degrees.They had an embarrassment of them. BAs, MAs, PhDs. But they knew Sweet Fanny Adams about Easter Week as […]

I’m recently back from the US, where I was promoting my book Martin McGuinness:The Man I Knew (no home is complete without one). That, and singing the praises of my six-week-old grandson to anyone who would listen. Like many Irish people, I have a love-hate relationship with the US. Some of the hate targets are […]

October 12  The American Brexit Committee released today a letter to Congressman Gerald Connolly (D-VA) *, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to block Britain’s International Trade Secretary  from entering the United States and to seek the removal of a British military attache.  Fox served as Shadow Secretary of State for  Defense from 2005-2010 and Secretary of […]

Do the Irish Times have a substantial sum of money on Michael D Higgins to win the Irish presidential election? Probably not, given that Michael D is quoted by Boylesports on odds of 1/50. Even the mountebanks of the paper of record would be reluctant to invest with those kind of odds. On the other […]

I see that Sinn Fein’s candidate for the Irish Presidency is open to the idea of wearing a Royal British Legion Poppy. Private citizens in Ireland have always been free to do so, but so far as I know those who held the Presidency have never done so. There was a time in Dublin when […]

Time has been a vital factor in the Brexit process from the start. In the early stages, probably to encourage focus, Theresa May triggered Article 50, so putting herself and the Tories under pressure. Clearly, this was not a time for Tories to sit on their hands. Unfortunately, that’s what the Tories have done – sat on their hands. Here […]

Dear Stanley, As a well-read man, you’ll know that line from Mark Twain:   “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”. Yes, it’s sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln and sometimes to Samuel Johnson, but the advice is the same – zip the lip, […]

Usually when John Humphries interviews somebody on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he does much of the talking. Not so this morning. He had an interview with the Tánaiste Simon Coveney, and it was Coveney who grabbed the conversational reins. No prizes for the subject under discussion. Coveney put a slab of gelignite […]

  At the eleventh hour on the Eleventh day of the eleventh month of  the year of our Divine Lord 1918  the guns fell silent in Western Europe.Most Europeans, including the Irish,, at the time acknowledged Jesus Christ as their Lord, and   their calendar was dated from His birth -Anno Domini, shortened to AD. That […]