November, 2020

YOU CAN TAKE IT FROM ME THAT FINTAN O’TOOLE IS NOT A PRIG by Donal Kennedy I’ve read , listened to, and seen commentary by Fintan O’Toole in or on various media for decades. Like myself he was born in Dublin and schooled by the Irish Christian Brothers. Unlike myself he’s a University Graduate, He […]

Once portrayed as the great hope for Britain’s left as leader of the Labour party,  they sang his praises from the high street to the Glastonbury music festival. With one voice in concert, they sang together ‘One Jeremy Corbyn’. Now thanks to Keir Starmer, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Equality and […]

 You probably saw reports of it: that moment a week or so back, when it appeared that, as The Guardian  put it, “Amazon had pledged its backing to a united Ireland.” What happened was, a man called Chris Jones from Ballyclare in Co Antrim was trying to find  a way of seeing the England v Georgia […]

During the Troubles, there was no shortage of politicians and pundits willing to scramble on top of a coffin, if it allowed them to fire accusations and condemnations at their political enemies. The one thing to be said in mitigation for such people was that they didn’t benefit financially. Today,  there are politicians (think Trump) […]

Are you watching the latest series of THE CROWN on Netflix?  If so, do you think it’s a faithful representation of the royals?  And what about the English take on Ireland – do they understand us at all at all? Now that a second vaccine for Covid has been discovered, will we be jostling to […]

I wasn’t hallucinating but standing in the shower this morning listening to BBC Radio  Four when an Irish short-story writer named Kevin Barry  endorsed the statement that Ireland was catapulted into  the 21st Century from the 19th Century, missing the 2Oth. What a cockeyed, perverse and ignorant  contention! James Joyce, for a start, made his […]

Some twenty five years or so ago, with a few hours to spare in London’s West End, I bumped into my son, who by chance was also free, and we went to Trafalgar Square, where  the post-Apartheid flag had just been raised over South Africa House. I had often passed the building in three decades in […]

There’s an almost certainly untrue story about the peasant woman who was so intent on milking her cow, she didn’t realise that WW1 was being fought above and all around her.  But while the facts of the story are almost certainly day-dreamt,  the story carries a truth: people are capable often focus on the most […]

I think that some English people’s grasp of the history of Ireland might have arisen from reading graffiti written on the bog walls in the Bull in Ambridge. Indeed, a review of the Cambridge History of Ireland in HISTORY IRELAND a couple of years back suggests that the reviewer’s opinion of that book differs little from […]

Peter Sutcliffe died yesterday. Known as the Yorkshire Ripper, over a period of five years he murdered thirteen women and tried to murder another seven. He was arrested nine times in the course of the investigation but was released by police. The investigation was further muddled by a man known as Wearside Jack, who pretended […]