Author Harry McAvinchey

There’s a point being missed regarding the Daithi McKay/Jamie Bryson debacle over Peter Robinson and the NAMA scandal.Put bluntly …It’s the unusual pragmatism involved in an ultra -loyalist sharing a stealth assault on the leader of the unionist DUP with a member of Sinn Fein…..any member of Sinn Fein! The fact that he actually took […]

“John Hennigan, from Harlow, Essex, was jailed for 18 months on Tuesday after pleading guilty to breaching his Asbo again in April last year when he made racist comments to a black woman shopper and her children in the town.” There was a time when there was a thing called a “family newspaper” .This was […]

This is a story about a disease that has been allowed to spread unabated like some parasitic pestilence through specific areas of our society.It is as though plague such as the Black Death had visited only specific areas and left other areas alone.Is this down to class-politics?   Sometimes I wonder if there is such […]

Our First Minister of Norneverland, Arlene Foster , seems to have some fears after the Brexit vote to exit the EU and the loss of EU finances in the future.There is also the fear that the economy will not be so easily sustained without the free-movement of people. In a letter to the British Government, […]

Now there’s a thought….What would be your opinion on” NIMBYS”? You know those guys who are ostensibly liberal about all sorts of things until they are confronted with a hard reality right at their door, or in the sanctity of their home. Every man’s home is his personal space and some might say it is […]

“Sail me on a silver sun, where I know that I’m free Show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea” (“It’s All Too Much”) :The Beatles   “Ageism” isn’t necessarily the thought that immediately springs to mind when you are atop an aluminium ladder , racked out to it’s full extent, its […]

You’ll all probably know that the “NewStatesman” is an influential magazine of some 100 years’ longevity, having what it likes to call a left -of -centre feel to its politics and is the kind of magazine that has attracted writers and thinkers of the intellectual calibre and political heft of the late Christopher Hitchens and […]

He said he was from Kentucky ….or was it Louisiana? He talked so much that the details began to run into a minestrone soup of blurred imagery. He was fifty five years old , was the grandfather of a little boy by one of his daughters . He spoiled the little fellow rotten when he […]

The Irish were described during Julius Caesar’s time as a cannibal race who devoured their foes and lived in a land of perpetual Winter. They called that land “Hibernia” . Looking out the window at the bleakest July of sodden rain, I can see the writer’s point, but it is a neat vision like something […]

  I suppose we all needed a light-hearted laugh after all the trauma and Shakespearean drama of the disembowelling of government and the impending divorce from Europe. After Brexit has been finally agreed and we leave the Eurropean Community to pave our own path in the world.As I said , we needed a bit of […]