July, 2025

We can often tell the way people see the world by the range of their vision.There are those who like to keep focused on a particular point or event, cutting out any surrounding matters and declaring that only this laser-like focus will take us through. To quote Father Jack, it will and my arse.  We’ve […]

  RSH. Bring a Pac-a-Mac. By Randall Stephen Hall. With an original song from 2010 CUT MY HAIR https://youtu.be/NQo9q_NU-EQ?si=uZNsxuOkmstgVzjp   When I was young and growing up  In North Belfast 1957 – 2025, in a lower middle class family, I was taken to the 12th Celebrations yearly. I even marched once, with my uncle Richard […]

History moves so slowly, you could weep. Here’s a column I wrote in The Irish News on 11 July 2002. Few things unite myself and William of Orange. I’m not of royal blood, I don’t have long curly hair and I’m not gay. But there is one thing we have in common – the Twelfth […]

You could call it a tale of two bonfires, but this Twelfth it goes beyond bonfires. What must be asked is ‘Who is running things in Belfast?’and the answer must be loyalist paramilitaries. And if you think a bonfire built beside an electricity sub-station and a heap of asbestos is bad, check out Moygashel with […]

MAD – that’s the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, and it’s the basis on which the world powers with nuclear weapons operate. If you attack us with nuclear weapons, we’ll hit back and we’ll all die. I remember a New Yorker cartoon years ago which caught the system rather well. It showed a Stone Age […]

There’s a scene in My Fair Lady, where Eliza Doolittle has had enough and tells off the men surrounding her: Words!“Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!I get words all day through;First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?” I thought of Eliza yesterday during Talkback. Presenter Crawley was looking […]

  So Israel has come up with a new wheeze. Rather than keep over two million Gazans in an area smaller than County Louth, the smallest county in Ireland, and the world’s biggest out-door prison, from which Hamas attempted a jail break on October 7 2023, it’s now being proposed that all Gazans will be […]

  “As the midday sun shone down on 2 May 1654 and the river Suir went quietly by, while the Comeraghs looked on, Fr Tirry’s life on earth was ended on a scaffold in the Market Square in Clonmel. He was now a grain of wheat.” In a booklet  Priest on the Run by Fr John O’Connor […]

Consider this.   The town sheriff, name of  Aten, is on the record as having killed ten men. He says the ten threatened him and there are other people in the town- men and women and even children – who have vowed to get him.So when he shot the ten in the back it was […]

The GPO is the jewel of O’Connell Street in Dublin – or it should be. There’s talk about cleaning up and renovating O’Connell Street generally, so what should be done with the historic GPO – offices?? The field for the next Presidential election in November isn’t looking particularly crowded at the moment. Will Mairead McGuinness […]