May, 2026

“It’s a different world, this social media thing…You talk to people at doors and you don’t expect people to be taping you.” That was Bertie Ahern, looking back ruefully at a doorstep conversation he had with a woman in a Dublin constituency, where he was helping the Fianna Fail candidate go door to door.  Help […]

  According to an early Fianna Fáil Handbook, the aims of that party were stated thus: 1.To secure the Unity and Independence of Ireland as a Republic. 2. To restore the Irish language as the spoken language of the people, and to develop a distinctive national life in accordance with Irish traditions and ideals. 3. To make the […]

Several years ago, I spotted  Wes Streeting  as a potential leader of the Labour Party. What impressed me were his verbal skills, his unflappability,  his presence: in any conversation, his was the voice that somehow got most attention. How things change. Now I know him better and see him for the smooth-talking windbag he is. […]

Keir Starmer surviving yet another revolt in the Labour Party feels less like a triumph of leadership and more like a man successfully escaping a collapsing gazebo at a garden centre sale. Technically impressive, perhaps, but nobody watching mistakes it for statesmanship. Every few months, Labour MPs gather in grim-faced clusters to declare that this, […]

Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer are often portrayed as opposites inside the Labour Party, but there are important parallels between them. Both emerged from Labour’s soft-left tradition, both presented themselves as reformers of the party, and both relied heavily on grassroots support during their rise. Corbyn built a mass membership movement around anti-austerity politics and […]

This is the confirmation season – kids get all dressed up, parents kneel and watch, a  tear in their eye. Does this make sense, if the parents aren’t in fact active Catholics?   Learning Irish appears to have done a major turn-around. When Pat & I were at secondary school a million years ago, we […]

  I  wonder if northern unionists (as distinct from the southern type) were to call on Micheál Martin to paint his rear a deep purple, and then run up and down the steps of Stormont, would he do it? There certainly can be no overestimation of the Taoiseach’s desire to love-bomb the unionists. “The principles […]

                                                              Keir Starmer is very opposed to pro-Palestine marches  because he associates them with anti-Semitism. Is he right? In the head? Mark Carney joined an […]

“And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew That one small head could carry all he knew” Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Deserted Village’   Ireland owes a debt to Micheál Martin. In 2004 he introduced a smoking ban: the South was one of the first states to bring in this ban, and by now it […]

Brendan Behan thought the arrival of a policeman was one sure way to make a bad situation worse. It looks as if he was onto something in the case of the Golders Green stabbing of two Jewish men. The video taken at the time shows a man who has been tasered lying on the ground, […]