Logo

The dog that didn’t bark in the night is always the give-away. There are almost no dogs barking across Europe at the calamitous failure of the European Union to protect its citizens a full year after the Pandemic arrived on its larger shores. Worse, for a few hours, the European Union, so beloved of Dublin’s chattering classes, repartitioned Ireland. That it was more in a fit of absent-mindedness by our beloved (if unelected) EU President Ursula von der Leyen than […]

I wrote this for the 90th anniversary of the First day on the Somme in 2006. It might help correct some the Anglcentric/Hibernocentric perceptions of the war Nightfall, ninety years ago today, and 899 Belfast men who that morning had risen from their trenches, as soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the British army, lay dead on Thiepval ridge, in the Somme valley. One hundred and ninety one of them were from the Shankill Road. Forty six officers lay dead among […]

This coming year marks the 120th anniversary of the establishment by Irish Marists of St Anthony’s school in Lahore, in what was then the Punjab Province of the British Raj in India. It’s usually forgotten nowadays — thanks to a republicanised history curriculum — that the Irish were often enthusiastic participants in the empire, as missionaries in particular, but also as soldiers and civil servants. And, of course, all education is thought-imperialism of a kind: thus French missionaries originally founded […]

There isn’t a single person in Ireland — and I am, most passionately in the general throng — who doesn’t want Fionnuala Britton to win a medal in the London Olympics. Yet, surely, we must all be aware of the con that is going on; there are so many events in the Olympics, that virtually every country gets a medal. And so while Lithuania exults over its silver in ferret-wrestling, and Ugandastan rejoices at its gold in toenail-filing, no one […]

It was clever of Vaclav Havel to die almost on the first anniversary of the self-immolation by Mohamed Bouazizi. The latter’s death was hailed throughout the western liberal media as the dawn of a new age; so let us now celebrate a full year of self-deceit and delusion. That idiotic term “the Arab Spring” in itself defines the historical ignorance that underwrites this myth. After all, the Prague Spring was deeply non-violent: it was crushed by tanks, but even the […]

The best thing about Christopher Hitchens was that he changed his mind whenever the evidence justified it. He started out on the classical English left, rather like his hero, George Orwell, and when he realised that it was an intellectually threadbare gallimaufry of ego-driven career politicians, cynical or witless trades union leaders, and middle-class emoters, he moved to the position of Permanent Sceptic. This is the only respectable position for any journalist of honour, which was easier to maintain in […]

Note to readers: this Column was atrociously headlined, “Suicide is self-murder and must be made totally taboo”, or something like that, which is the opposite of what I actually said (see the end of this column). Anyway, taboos are not consciously made; they are the creation of the collective unconscious, and it is because they work at a sub-liminal level that they are so very effective. Either way, here is my response to the tragic death of Garry Speed: NO […]

Memory is a curious thing. I was out walking my dogs in the driving rain and howling wind yesterday, when a spaceship visited me from the distant galaxy of my youth. A panel in the side of the spaceship opened, and I walked aboard. And there, all around me, was a forgotten episode from my early years, unvisited all these decades. I was playing for Ratcliffe under-16s against Coalville Grammar School. Coalville was — is — a small town in […]

If it’s winter here, the global warming conference must be in the southern hemisphere. And yes, of course, it’s in Durban, whither thousands of global warmists are now flying, in order to confer at colossal expense and tell us to cut our carbon dioxide emissions, or else. Else what? Else, they’ll have another global warming conference even sooner than scheduled — maybe next summer, in Cannes, or Split, or San Francisco, or Sharm-El-Sheikh. Though maybe not there, because the Muslim […]

Seldom has the professional liberal consensus been as exposed as it has in the past fortnight, with the bogus tweet during the presidential debate, the sorry affair in Naas, the libel-debacle in RTE and the squalid pickets outside the Israeli Film Festival in Dublin. There it was, in all its glory, the ruthlessness of doctrinaire media-liberalism; i.e. follow our rules, do as we do, or we will destroy you. It is a hypothetical question, of course; but do you actually […]