April, 2019

Person 1:  I’m so disappointed. Person 2:  Oh. About what? Person 1:  Felicity Huffman. Person 2: Who’s she? Person 1: She’s the Desperate Housewives star. Person 2: And why are you disappointed in her? Person 1:  She’s admitted to bribing college officials to get her daughter into a prestige US university. Person 2: Dirty work […]

U The SUNDAY TIMES “Mainland” Edition (April 7) leads with the Banner Headlines – “Labour’s hate files expose Corbyn’s anti-Semite army.” That paper once “exposed” a former Labour Leader, Michael Foot, as a Soviet agent, and was quite rightly penalised by a British Court for its lying libel. Now that Foot is around no more, the […]

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA   Before anything comes of this it first must be clearly understood that Marley is next door to being  dead, dead as a doornail, even a coffin nail itself, being on its last legs. Marley, indeed, is, erm,  Harley able to breathe. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wunnerful can come […]

There’s a tendency among commentators to point the finger at Donald Trump and claim his example has created a coarsening of political speech and has encouraged people to accept patent lies as truth. You’d be hard put to deny some truth to this.  His boasts about how he grabs women, his claims about his father […]

History seems to come in sudden, bewildering bursts. During the Troubles,  Bloody Sunday, the Hunger Strikes and the Good Friday Agreement stood out, announcing themselves even as they happened as events that would shape the future of  Ireland. Then after the Good Friday Agreement, the world’s media packed their bags and went off to other […]

History seems to come in sudden, bewildering bursts. During the Troubles,  Bloody Sunday, the Hunger Strikes and the Good Friday Agreement stood out, announcing themselves even as they happened as events that would shape the future of  Ireland. Then after the Good Friday Agreement, the world’s media packed their bags and went off to other […]

In April 1912, the then leader of the British Labour Party, Keir Hardie, proposed in the House of Commons that (common) soldiers be excused deployment in Industrial disputes which might pit them against their own families or class. I don’t know how much support he got from his fellow Labour MPs. I suspect he suffered the […]

Back in the day, one of the things people used to say was that with Ian Paisley, at least you knew where you stood. Except in the end, he proved us all wrong. The man who had led unionists up a hill to wave their gun licences, the man who had summoned a massive crowd […]

  When I was in Secondary School the purpose of teaching was to pass exams, because jobs were scarce and without a Certificate of some sort, the future looked hopeless. The teaching of poetry in Irish was not aimed at giving us an appreciation of a poem. We might learn eight lines of a long […]