June, 2019

 It was with deep regret that I opened my online newspaper this morning to see that the Labour Party had retained their Peterborough seat in yesterday’s election.  It shouldn’t have been that way. The Brexit Party’s Mike Greene should have asserted that party’s strangle-hold on British politics by putting a strangle-hold on the Labour Party’s […]

An appeal for all enquiring minds to learn of their genetic origins beyond politics, religion and tribal conflict. Simply by being given a prescription, paid for, by the state, of a free and detailed DNA test. Of course we are a combination of the cultures we have absorbed in our minds but much of our […]

Jon Snow said it reduced him, for the first time during an interview, to tears.  Hale and hearty veterans of D-Day were interviewed for insights into how they felt, what friends they had lost, how afraid they were during the landing on Normandy beaches. The world and its mother were represented. There were leaders from […]

Moray Place, Headquarters of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) and its  West Lothian Local Association  disowned me when I went on strike in solidarity with other Irish trade unionists on February 1st 1972, following the murder by British State forces of thirteen Derry civilians two days earlier; two of the dead were past pupils […]

The late Harold Wilson was credited with scoring the highest mark in some discipline at the University of Oxford since the late Cardinal Wolsey some  four and a half centuries earlier. Like Wolsey he became his Monarch’s senior minister and a wily politician. I don’t recall whether Wolsey ever pronounced on Ireland. Wilson had many […]

On the question of “Reproductive Rights” the still venerated pioneers of “Planned Parenthood”  Margaret Sanger in the USA and Marie Stopes in Britain did not espouse “Freedom of Choice.”  They vehemently opposed it. Both advocated  forced sterilisation, Sanger with great success, Stopes unsuccessfully in Britain. How Marie Stopes International fared I don’t know. Both were […]

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA LP was a key combo of letters back in the Fabulous Fifties. It dealt with combos, of the musical sort, and, as the records show, it  stood for Long Playing. Back then a dozen songs were required for  a LP. Off the top of one’s masthead, LPs of that special aural era […]

 Maybe it’s his name that irritates people. Trump.  In cards, to triumph,  in musical terms a suggestion of a trumpet fanfare. Maybe it’s his hair. Or his hands…But there I go again, commenting on a politician’s appearance. The reason Trump is detested is that he says and does detestable things. I could list some of […]

One of the things Sinn Féin used to be accused of was being a one-issue party: Irish reunification agus sin é.  That’s not been the case for a long time, as even s blind-man-on-a-galloping-horse glance at defeated-MEP Lynn Boylan’s Facebook page will tell you. Another rebuttal even more emphatic comes from her partner Eoin Ó […]

Like THE IRISH TIMES, London’s OBSERVER has pages headed “Comment and Analysis.”  Prudent commentators, you’d think, would analyse a subject before spouting about it. The Organs named habitually blot their copy with EJACULATIO PRAECOX. Without apology or embarrassment. The OBSERVER of 19 May has two articles on abortion, each in its support.Plurality of opinion on the matter […]