March, 2022

This article has been passed to me. You can judge for yourself whether its claims are valid.     As destructive as the Ukraine war is, Russia is causing less damage and killing fewer civilians than it could, U.S. intelligence experts say.  Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely […]

I still remember the morning I heard Martin McGuinness had passed away.  It came as a shock, and I do mean a complete shock, to the point I literally had to sit down. I didn’t even know Martin was ill.  I’d never got the ‘I think you should sit down’ thing until that day, thinking […]

   In May 1915, in accordance with the accepted rules of war. a German submarine sank the RMS Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale on its way from New York in the (neutral) United States to Liverpool.  Construction of the vessel, owned by Britain’s Cunard Line. began in 1904. Britain had long adhered to […]

In better days Ireland had a small merchant marine and a principled and sane foreign policy.  And Frank Aiiken played a big part in both.  When Minister for External Affairs he devoted himself to the cause of Nuclear Disarmament at the United Nations and was responsible for the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty which resulted from 8 […]

  With every day that passes the DUP and indeed Unionism as a whole (Yes Jamie, I mean you too) damages not only itself but what’s left of the fragile union connection to Great Britain. Every avenue Unionism thought it had to stop the NI Protocol is in fact being blocked off. With increasing haste […]

  Isn’t it heart-warming, the way the south of Ireland has opened its doors to Ukrainian refugees? Irish people really are the best. What’s that – there are over 8,000 immigrants stuck in hostels and that might have to do with their lack of similarity to us? Skin-colour and all that…  Did you ever come […]

      I find Fergal Keane an INCREDIBLE REPORTER and believe he has earned his OBE many times over.  I have on my shelves a book published by Dublin’s Talbot Press in 1922 and reprinted by Cork’s Mercier Press in 1996  with its text unaltered.  It is a collection of notes published immediately after […]

  Poor St Patrick!  Kidnapped   Enslaved.  Tending pigs.  Asleep to Ugly  Ignorant Grunts  In a strange  Sodden island.  His life cut short.  By Sixteen Hundred years.  Thus missing the Bliss  Of being too old to carry a Gun  When young men in Post-Christian Ireland  Hear Strumpet Blasts  Of Daffy windbags urging them  To war in foreign lands, […]

         This review first appeared in The Andersonstown News Ever since THE McCOOEYS (ask your granny), the BBC has been on the hunt for a soap based in NEI. ST MUNGO’S (BBC 1)  is the latest shot at bagging one.  The storyline makes few demands. Barry McGurk (Shaun Blaney) returns to his […]

          I recently watched a programme on the hunting of whales and polar bears on the northern coasts of  Alaska. It shocked me.  One of the hunters, a man of about forty, told how he had been put in a school where he was hit with a stick whenever he was […]