Jude Collins

  Last week RTÉ ran a three-part documentary on Sean Quinn, once the richest man in Ireland. Did they explain with sufficiently clarity what happened? Sean Quinn and his wife feel they were shafted, Alan Dukes thinks border people are prone to violence. The World Cup – was that decision about the-ball-over/not over the line […]

I accidentally turned on BBC Radio 4 and overheard a Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngodi Adichie, speak of freedom of expression, which she espouses and censorship which she abhors. Her language was quite ladylike, but she convinced me of her passion for freedom of expression when she said that most people were decent and there were only a […]

Two features “Irish Movie Magic”  and “Padraic Colum: balladeer, poet and cultural mentor, (Dec 3)” set me thinking of a link between Colum and a scene in “The Quiet Man.” Amongst other things. Colum briefly rented a house in 1914 immediately next to the one I was later brought up in on the Hill of […]

    Perhaps you are as much a babe in the woods as myself and never heard of of  BAP – the BRITISH AMERICAN PROJECT.   Founded in the 1980s it has been described as the brain-child of Ronald Reagan, with U.S.Embassy funding amid concern about anti-American drift in the Labour Party then led by […]

    My recent BLOG “Who Wrote JFK’s Speeches?” noted that his address to the Oireachtas was given 41 years to the day since Michael Collins, on the orders of Winston Churchill, bombarded his former comrades in the Four Courts with guns borrowed from the British garrison. I noted that virtually all of my generation were […]

Mary Lou McDonald has been getting some pretty severe kicks from Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin. Par for the course, I suppose. But now the voice of a man who is friendly  – very friendly – with the Hutch gang has said she has let the Hutch family down by not attending the funeral of […]

Last night BBC2 devoted more than an hour to Simon Schama’s “HISTORY OF NOW”.   He depicted Picasso’s “Guernica, praised George Orwell and spent much time attacking the Soviet Union, China and the various BETES NOIR of Britain’s current establishment. Oh and he was unsympathetic to Franco’s Fascists. He neglected the fact that British Intelligence officers flew General […]

I read recently, I think in THE TIMES of London, of two young gentlemen who in 1919 played golf with two other gentlemen, solely with the aim of seducing their wives. An aim in which they succeeded.   I do not know if either of them had heard of, and doubt if either had read, […]

  The so-called ‘Troubles’ have been replaced by a new controversy with unionists and journalists railing against ‘rewriting’ history. For Unionists the conflict was about a ‘democracy beset by irrationalism terrorism.’ For Irish republicans it was a war of resistance to British repression. This book uses Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model to evaluate the media coverage […]

This was the week when Westminster told Nichola Sturgeon No, and when Ireland’s Future crammed a thousand people into the Ulster Hall. Funny the way things happen in twos. An article in today’s Irish Times comments on how so many countries have been built on the destruction of the culture and the dispossession killing of […]