Logo

And that was the summer; another season gone. The start of no other time of year is so infused with melancholy as the one now upon us. The leaves are beginning to turn to crispy brown paper in the autumn sun. Soon they will be gone, and the empire of the early dusk and the long night begins. There are consolations to be got from the roaring fire and the buttered scones and those cold clear winter days when you […]

The child-rapist Joseph McColgan is probably the most evil man ever to appear before an Irish court. He was spotted mingling among youngsters at a car boot sale on Saturday in Plymouth. It passes all belief that this creature is now alive and well and living a free man in Devon, having been recently freed from a British prison after serving only half of a 30 month sentence imposed last year by Exeter Crown Court for child pornography offences. And this […]

Oh this day to see the face of Abdelbasset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, who must really have thought that he’d got away with the mass-murder of 270 people. For in one of the most infamous and degrading decisions ever taken by a western democracy, this creature was allowed to return to Libya two years ago, because he was “terminally-ill”. This was in accordance with “Scottish values” – whatever they might be – declared Kenny McAskill, the Socrates in charge of […]

Are you against capital punishment? You probably are. Very well. If Hitler or Himmler, he of The Final Solution, had been captured alive, should they have been executed? Would it not have been a revolting insult to the millions of dead for those men to have been allowed to remain alive? No doubt they could have penned exquisitely thoughtful essays on the meaning of guilt in the long years that mercy might have allowed them, but really, the world is […]

I was writing earlier this summer about the “meme”, the mental equivalent of a gene: it is like a small cultural package that enters a community of minds, and mutates just like a gene. Urban myths are memes. So are most political ideas. Feminism is a classic meme. Whether you like them or not, these memes have a structural energy which gives people direction.   But as the Leaving Cert and the A-Level results in maths in Ireland and England […]

Phew. We can all breathe easy again: the first two of the Ugandan Air Force’s six supersonic Sukhoi Su-30MK2 have arrived safely in Kampala. The full half dozen aircraft will cost about $740 million. The Su-30MK2 – you will also be happy to hear – is optimised for the anti-shipping role. At its nearest point, Uganda is over four hundred miles from the sea, and Kampala, where the aircraft are based, is some 500 miles from the Indian Ocean. But […]

The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. If we don’t do that, it’s the equivalent of a nurse comfortably chatting over a nice cup of tea while an empty saline drip feeds air into a patient’s artery. The moment that we think it’s more important to protect some comfortable ideological dogma is the moment when our particular patient, truth, begins to die. I take no pleasure in what follows; but there is a job to be done, so […]

Leave your bed at first light on an August day as I did yesterday: you will hear no birdsong and no morning chorus, just the dull frantic cheeps of sparrows who realise that they’ve got another twenty days of this terrible month, and they’re not sure if they’re going to make it. August is the mensal unit without any real character of its own: it is a nonth. [stet nonth]     August is naf. August is a cane-toad in […]

As one bearded baldy bloke bows out from the presidential race, is it not time for us to rescue another BBB from the wastelands of retirement to which he was so hastily and unjustly dispatched? Michael Fingleton is surely the embodiment of all that is good about the Celtic Tiger. He has throughout been quite fearless in defence of his own self-interest. He rather resembles the captain of the ship, after he has steered it into an iceberg, and who […]