Jude Collins

      Within about two weeks of Bloody Sunday in Derry (30th January 1972), Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the 1st Battalion of Britain’s Parachute Regiment, was awarded by his Sovereign with an Order of Chivalry.   Some 38 years later Lord Saville found that Wilford had disobeyed orders and Prime Minister David Cameron […]

      The 1916 Insurgents ensured that no inhabitants of any of the 32 counties of Ireland would  be subject to conscription into an armed institution.  Nearly one hundred and eight years later the inhabitants remain free of such an imposition.   Not only hundreds of thousands of Irish lives have thus been spared […]

J P McManus is an Irish  billionaire. He has also given away an awful lot of money to the GAA in every county in Ireland. Some clubs will receive as much as £30,000. Is this a case of a truly generous man, or is he simply dodging taxation while looking good in the public eye? […]

       It’ll probably come as a serious shock to many, but the Orange Order is not a religious organisation  – it’s a political one.  You could be forgiven for thinking it was a religious organisation, given that it was founded in  1795, after a Protestant sectarian gang had killed some 30 Catholics; given that, during […]

  One of the things we look for in a newspaper is consistency. It can’t one day be left-wing, the next right-wing. It can’t one day be  protesting about fossil fuels, the next calling for more turf-cutting. And it can’t be one day be putting the boot into the shadowy organisation called Sinn Féin and […]

  George Orwell did humanity a favour when he introduced the word ‘doublethink’. This referred to the ability some have of holding two opinions, one contradicting the other, at the same time. Take the US’s foreign policy. In the case of Ukraine, they are applauding that country of 38 million people for…what? For resisting the […]

Do Americans know or care that they could stop the Gaza slaughter by turning off the financial and military tap that flows so generously in Israel? Will people remember the horror of what is still happening? Will the Arab world seek its own revenge over coming years in a world which failed to help Gaza […]

    The 1916 Insurgents ensured that no inhabitants of any of the 32 counties of Ireland would not be subject to conscription into an armed institution.   Nearly one hundred and eight years later the inhabitants remain free of such an imposition.   Not only hundreds of thousands of Irish lives have thus been […]

  The US and the UK were just about the only countries at the UN  yesterday which didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Is this blind support of Israel making sense to most people?   It looks as if the UK is paying a heavy price for that Brexit flight from the EU. […]

Britain lost a great man today :  the poet Benjamin Zephaniah.  He was funny, he was upright, he was compassionate, he could spot a phoney from half a mile away. When he was offered an Order of the British Empire (OBE), his response (unlike,oh, who, oh yes, you in the corner, blushing – Fergal Keane) […]