January, 2024

          I was born on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, 28 December 1941 in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles St, Dublin.    My mother jokingly called it Holler Street. An older lying-in Hospital across the Liffey was and remains called the Rotunda, echoing the shape of its patients.   There […]

  I like Malachi O’Doherty. Over the years he has done me a favour or two, and it’s hard to be totally negative towards someone who helps you. I also like the terrier-like quality with which he approaches discussion/argument: at any moment, you feel, he may drop to the floor and bite you in the […]

    In Dublin, Cork, Galway – across the south – there have been arson attacks on premises planned to house immigrants. Is Ireland (or the southern lot, anyway) a country full of ignorant racists? Are the gardaí going too soft?  Come to that, are the garda ranks somewhere that young people now want to […]

You don’t have to take my word for it.     CHECK  AMATEUR COLOUR MOVIES ON YOUTUBE     1. HOWTH REGATTA  AND LAMBAY RACES 1942.   2. “ONCE UPON A TRAM” 1959.

Sir Frank Kitson died recently. He was a major figure in the war against the IRA, masterminding operations that resulted in the deaths of people, many of them innocent. He is detested in Derry for his part in Bloody Sunday, detested in Belfast for his part in the Ballymurphy massacre – but was he a […]

  Crime and punishment have always been a difficult juggling act. We used to be much more severe with criminals. You could get deported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing a sheep. Teachers and parents routinely slapped their children around for one rule-break or another, and the police didn’t take seriously calls about an attack […]

 Since December 1   2023, 14 people have died on the roads of the South. That’s not so much a grim statistic as a shameful loss of life. Normal healthy people get up in the morning, leave home and never come back. And that was happening roughly every second day. It’s tempting to point the finger […]

      Starting to do a little tidying up following recent merrymaking, I was, as usual,diverted on finding an old writing.   I drafted it as a letter to the IRISH POST in 1984 but I’m not sure if I sent it. As yesterday, 2nd January I was reading a piece reflecting on that […]

  Another day, another rapping of Sinn Féin knuckles in the Irish Times, this one coming from former Irish ambassador Bobby McDonagh. As McDonagh sees it, Sinn Féin got it right until they got it wrong:   “Having argued sensibly, including at party leader level, that it would be wrong to expel the Israeli ambassador […]

      I’ve checked on the meanings of TRUST in The Oxford Paperback Dictionary.   Used as a noun it can mean “firm belief in the reliability, or strength of a person or thing, a confident expectation, a responsibility arising from trust in the person given authority”.   It also can mean “an organisation […]