December, 2024

          Below is the text of a letter published in THE IRISH POST ON 13th OCTOBER 2012:   “Recently I discovered on You Tube a programme put out on BBC called Ireland’s Hated   Hero.     I was somewhat surprised that the subject was Eamon de Valera, for I can remember […]

  In fifteen days I will be 83 years old. I was born an oasis of peace amid a world at war. That was my good fortune, not a matter of luck. That peace was the fruit of the work of Connolly and Pearse, de Valera and others, soberly calculated and bravely carried out. I […]

  Dickie Rock has died and his funeral was stuffed with important people, all lauding his goodness,kindness, singing ability and whatever you’re having yourself. Is this kind of canonisation what should happen? As we make our trembling way to Christmas, news that the Capuchin Centre in Dublin opened its hampers-for-the-poor one morning this week and […]

  I remember reading the very first edition of THE SUNDAY PRESS in September 1949 when I was nearly 8 years old.   The paper collapsed 46 years later and my piece reproduced here was published in THE IRISH DEMOCRAT just before that collapse.   It was called “SUNDAY , SUNDAY.   ” ‘ In […]

      Sir Keir Starmer’s characterisation of the Assad regime as barbaric  is perhaps a sign of his own ignorance.   Or the presumption that us lesser mortals are unaware of the collusion between such regimes and the liberal western democracies.   Not only was intelligence extracted through torture passed by the Syrian regime […]

A few days ago, I went to the launch of a new book about the renowned poet John Montague, written by Adrian Frazier, a professor in Galway university. The launch was held in Garvaghey GAA Centre, County Tyrone and a crowd of about four hundred from all walks of life turned out. The book “John […]

                      I was born in December 1941 in an oasis of peace in a world gone mad.   You may check HOWTH REGATTA AND LAMBAY RACES 1942 on Youtube.   A short amateur movie shot in colour with music soundtrack added in recent years.   […]

    Roger Casement, serving in the British Consular Service discovered that his bosses were plotting war. He exposed their great crime and they plotted his murder and promised his servant, in writing, thousands of dollars and free passage to America if he arranged to have him knocked on the head. Casement exposed that crime too. […]

  How do you feel about Luigi Mangione? He’s the 26-year-old arrested for the shooting dead in Manhattan of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare. Your natural first reaction might well be “How horrible”.  The alleged gunman fired a number of shots into the back of Thompson , before, as they say, fleeing the scene. […]

I have fond memories of Hammersmith, dancing to “The March of the Mods” by Joe Loss in December 1964,  and enjoying the Chieftains’ sessions in one of its pubs a few years later. Many decades later, in fact early this year, I enjoyed the brilliant dramatisation of the written memoirs of Sean Moylan in the […]