It occurs to me that Heaney’s poem from his first book, Death of a Naturalist, 1966, describes a cultural bedrock, that, with fierce Puritanism and other basic faults, the sheer necessity of “having a good name”, regardless of whether this was justified or not, The Beast in Man . . . justified Magdalen laundries (‘a […]
October, 2021
Enemy of the State – by Jude Whyte
In May 1981 I took a bus from the city hall in Belfast to Rose Park House in east Belfast, an uncompromisingly ugly building, it was, on reflection a perfect place to recruit civil servants to run this part of the empire: dour, dank and reeking of colonization. Mrs Windsor greeted me at the door […]
WHEN BRITAIN WAS READY TO DROP MUSTARD GAS ON IRISH CIVILIANS – by Donal Kennedy
On October 8th 1940 the British War Cabinet adopted an RAF plan to drench Ireland in poison gas if German forces landed there. At the time the Germans were in control of continental Atlantic coasts from Norway to the South of France,and the British Channel Islands, but no plans to use such weapons there have […]
“Israel” – Beyond Apartheid – by Fra Hughes
This blog was first published for Al Mayadeen English in Lebanon Apartheid (/əˈpɑːrt(h)aɪt/, especially South African English: /əˈpɑːrt(h)eɪt/, Afrikaans: [aˈpartɦɛit]; transl. “separateness”, lit. “aparthood”) was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South-West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 until the early 1990s. 20 years on from the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and […]
A MODEST PROPOSAL by Donal Kennedy
During the past 50 years various Irish State Agencies and Bodies established by the State have engaged in a concerted attempt to destroy it. The Department of Foreign Affairs and RTE have combined forces in the Irish Embassy in Brussels, for instance, and the Embassy in London had Ambassador Mulhall, through ignorance or malice, repeat […]
PAT + JUDE TALK ABOUT FROST’S ARTICLE 16 THREAT, SIMON C HURRYING TO ARMAGH, AND 15% CORPORATION TAX
Why don’t the EU tell the UK to go ahead and unilaterally trigger Article 16? They keep threatening, suggesting they are in the dominant position when it’s clear they are in deep doodoo. Or do you think they’ve been hoodwinked into this ghastly protocol trap? Michael D Higgins isn’t going but Simon Coveney – […]
The government and the púca
Do you think, are many in the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil party believers in the púca? I mean they’ve spent thirty, forty years trying to convince the people of the south that Sinn Féin are lepers, political toxin, and what happens? They keep winning votes. A few years back, it appeared for the first […]
FINTAN AND ME: A TALE OF TWO CITIZENS – by Donal Kennedy
Both Fintan O’Toole and myself were born in Dublin when Eamon de Valera was Taoseach and John Charles McQuaid was Archbishop of Dublin. Both of us were taught by the Irish Christian Brothers. O’Toole was born in 1958 and has lived there ever since. I was born in 1941 and lived in Dublin for the first 23 years of my life, except for a couple of […]
Sláintecare: who are resisting it and why?
Why do we over-complicate things? Why do we ignore the solution to a problem when that solution is centimetres from our nose? Maybe because we fear the simple version of things, maybe because we fear to hear the answer that’d come back to us. Take Sláintecare, the commendable efforts by the south to build a […]
Leona, Lisa – and Granny too
This blog first appeared in the Andersonstown News “Nice to see ya!” yipped Ryan Tubridy (THE LATE LATE SHOW, RTÉ ONE) to golf sensation Leona Maguire. The stand-out player at the Solheim Cup, where she led Europe to victory over the US, smiled in a way that was at once modest and assured. Tubridy kept mentioning Leona’s twin sister Lisa. It appears […]