Author Jude Collins

No sooner had Jude Collins posted my blog about JDVance and what it means to be ‘a  devout Catholic’ than he commented on Pope Leo’s encylical Magnifica Humanitas. JD must have been reading Jude’s site and decided he had better get a comment out and this is what he had to say quoted in Our […]

    The Vice- President of the USA, J.D. Vance said on a CBS interview that he was ‘heart-broken’ because of the Statement from the US Catholic bishops condemning Trump’s plan to deport immigrants. In an interview on CBS, Vance was asked about the Bishops statement in which they condemned Trump’s orders on immigration. The […]

    IF you’re from Donegal, it’ll not have escaped your notice that Donegal thrashed Kerry  IN KILLARNEY over the weekend. Jimmy, it would appear, is still winnin’ matches.   Those two by-elections – the media are presenting them as Sinn Féin suffering another set-back, especially Mary Lou and her leadership. We tell her what […]

  How did you respond to the sight of the Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir mocking the flotilla people whom Israel had kidnapped in international waters(war crime) and strutted about telling them they were welcome to Israel? The event was filmed, so the Israelis must have been OK with that. Did they show it so […]

I was really glad to see that video clip of Israeli treatment of people seized from that aid-providing flotilla headed for Gaza. I was glad when Israeli minister Ben-Gvir was shown mocking them and taunting them. I was happy that the members of the flotilla were shown with their hands tied behind their back, kneeling […]

Money is an attention-magnet. If you’re in a restaurant, say, and a man walks by your table, you may or may not pay attention to him. But if somebody mentions that he’s a hugely rich man, worth many millions,  however spiritual you are, you’ll swivel and gawk at him like everybody else.   Philip O’Doherty […]

  The Democratic Unionist Party’s relationship with the Irish language has long resembled a man reacting to a toaster as if it were an unexploded bomb. Mention bilingual signage, an Irish-medium school, or the phrase céad míle fáilte, and somewhere in DUP headquarters a siren seems to go off. The language isn’t treated as a […]

“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. […]