Jude Collins

        Three stars of the Irish Times set my teeth on edge.    One is a bigoted Atheist, raised a Catholic who vents his spleen on Catholicism.   The second, no less insufferable, is a Jesuit Priest.   The third the paper’s Political Editor, Jesuit-schooled and a contributor to “STUDIES” a reputedly […]

Inbox     In 1972  Belfast man Liam Holden, a civilian, innocent of violence, was tortured into confessing to killing a British soldier and condemned to death by a British Court, after which he was imprisoned for seventeen years.   Mr Holden died last year aged 68, a decade after his conviction was quashed.   […]

  How many times have nationalists and Republicans and indeed ‘other’ and none asked Unionism in NEI to respect our rights both within and without the GFA? An underestimation would be thousands of times over decades on many and varied issues ranging from housing rights and identity to the right not to be tortured during […]

 You like your media balanced? You got it in today’s Irish Times. Justine McCarthy laments the shamrockery and Ireland-50-years-ago tone of Joe Biden’s visit here; Stephen Collins said it didn’t do him or us a bit of harm. Collins defends the president for being a traditional Catholic – but thanks be to God, Collins suggests, […]

        “It has been the RUC who have held the fabric of this society together for the past 30 years” – Mo Mowlam on the RUC, 9th of September 1999. The words of Mo Mowlam on that day will ring hollow to many a Catholic, nationalist and Republican who through no fault […]

  Britain’s Lord Great Chamberlain, Rupert Francis John, the 7th Baron Carrington, will play a key role in the Coronation of Charles III. THE TIMES (April 20) devotes most of a page to the man, the family and the duties involved.   The First Baron was the best friend of King Edward VII and introduced […]

Northern Irish Unionism and the DUP stands at a crossroads and all roads lead to Stormont.  It’s not just any crossroads, but one strewn with the political fallout and debris they have left during their recent misguided, misinformed journey.  Some might say the DUP have every right to drop the entirety of NEI in the […]

The Gerard Hutch trial failed to follow the script.  It was supposed to have produced a guilty verdict and then an endorsement of that verdict by the local people, happy to have the foot of the criminal overlord removed from their neck. It didn’t work out as the script required. Instead, Gerard Hutch walked free […]

I suppose I should be more positively disposed towards Keir Starmer…I mean SIR Keir Starmer. He’s critical of wasteful activity by Tory ministers, but let’s look at his own expense account. When he was Director of Public Prosecutions, between 2008 and 2013, he managed to burn his way through some serious expenses. An example: he […]

                He opened with a clanger, dating the Battle of Fredericksberg to September, rather than December 1862.   He also quoted a speech by Lloyd George. I knew that it was by Lloyd George and was surprised that TDs who could remember the old blackguard didn’t throw things […]