April, 2020

As if things weren’t bad enough, shocking and depressing news today on the B(ritish)BC website.Brace yourself: Queen Elizabeth’s birthday gun salute has been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.  Her Majesty has of course two birthdays – one on Tuesday and another in June (no, Virginia, this does not mean the monarch is 188 years […]

In 1840 the 25 year old Thomas Davis addressed the Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin, the oldest undergraduate society in the world, founded by Edmund Burke, and once had Theobald Wolfe Tone as its Auditor.  “Gentlemen, you have a country”  he told his audience, all of them male, who, in a less barbarous age […]

[This blog first appeared in the Andersonstown News] Where have  all the preachers gone? The guys who used to tell us that modern life was far too hectic, too pressurized,  we were ignoring  or hadn’t time for what really matters in life. Like silence. And your family. And Nature. No need to preach any more […]

Nothing like the Coronavirus pandemic has ever happened in my life-time. They say the last comparable pandemic was the Spanish flu in 1918 which killed fifty million people worldwide. There is no satisfactory explanation for that pandemic. Some say it originated in the USA not in Spain. Indeed, there have been plagues of one kind or another throughout […]

As we all sweat it out under lock-down/up, Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin have been cobbling together a programme for government when they finally get into bed together. But it’ll have to be at least a threesome – just the two of them (and their respective parties) won’t work. Even Stephen Collins in today’s Irish […]

    The TITANIC sank on 15 April 1912 .Its first,(and last) port of call was Queenstown Co. Cork where the Jesuit Father Brown disembarked, on 12 April. having taken numerous brilliant photographs en route from Southampton. He was one lucky Irishman, for many Irish men, women and children boarded at Queenstown, most as third […]

 Here is a communication I received yesterday.    Food for thought *SOMETHING IS FISHY!! Wuhan to Shanghai = 839km Wuhan to Beijing = 1,152km Wuhan to Milan = 15,000km Wuhan to NY = 15,000km The Coronavirus started in Wuhan yet there is no effect of Coronavirus in nearby Beijing or Shanghai but many deaths in […]

Eamonn Holmes got himself into a bit of bother the other day.  There’d been a phone-in on TV, I believe, where various theories were put forward explaining where the coronavirus began, particularly linking it to the 5G network, which a number of Chinese cities were developing at the time of the outbreak. Holmes didn’t say […]

If there are any things more frightening than the prospect of losings one’s loved ones to the Corona Virus they are the prospects of Bono getting the Nobel Prize for Peace and Bob Geldof getting the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Frightening certainly, but perhaps not inappropriate. For it seems that Alfred Nobel was an ego-tripper to […]

This is a short interview with Brian McCabe and Dr Jim McLaughlin,  both of whom are involved  with other New York  Irish-Americans in the fight against Covid-19