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The unwonted hysteria over Chinese pandemic permitting, I shall be talking at the Percy French Summer School in Castlecoote later this month. This year’s subject is Truth, and to judge from previous years, the only way you’ll have of learning about what’s being said there is by your presence. Even though last year it was the only summer-school in the entire island, the mainstream media – which usually rejoice at the easy copy that results from summer schools, since these […]

Eighty years ago this morning, three and a half million soldiers of the Third Reich began the invasion of the Soviet Union; there was little doubt what the outcome would be. The USSR had spent the previous decade almost annihilating itself. The earlier destruction of the class of kulaks – industrious small farmers – had cost about a million lives, but that was just the foretaste of what Stalin was about to inflict upon his empire. During the great purges […]

It’s hard to know which is more worrying; the unanimous decision by Cork City Councillors to denounce Eoghan Harris, or the equally unanimous indecision of Irish journalists in reply. Welcome to Servilia, the state whose citizens abjectly comply with the consensus emanating from our new cultural rulers, Sinn Fein-IRA, Sfira. To be sure, Eoghan Harris was – as charged  –  critical of John Hume’s role in the so-called peace process: but no more critical than I was or Seamus Mallon, […]

Geography is a cruel but inescapable master. In addition to governing propinquity, it often inspires atavisms that are usually best supressed, as the latest row over the Northern Ireland Protocol and Brexit attests. It was this propinquity and these atavisms which produced the Schleswig-Holstein question, the complexity of which bedevilled 19th-century diplomacy. Lord Palmerstone said: “Only three people have ever grasped the solution to this question. The Prince Consort, who is dead. A certain German professor, who went mad. And […]

In the last week of May 2021, Dail Eireann approved perhaps the most morally degrading motion in its history. The vote to denounce the state of Israel for the imaginary “annexation” of the West Bank was not in itself wicked per se because of the content of the motion; many people around the world would have approved of it, though I would not. The basic assertion about “annexation” is factually, empirically and provably wrong. But what made the Dail’s vote […]

A year on from the most famous killing of the 21st century, and the Floydian falsehoods keep on coming. The latest was BBC 4’s broadcast of The Violence Paradox. This was a two-hour televisual presentation, complete with sonorous voice-over, of Stephen Pinker’s thesis that the world is a far more peaceful place than it used to be. Underlying its message was a worldview that essentially repeated and even vindicated the lies and fabrications of the Black Lives Matter/Antifa alliance. Now […]

All those who cherish the truth, who respect courage and who admire tenacity will welcome the finding of the Ballymurphy Inquest that found that the ten people shot by Paras there during internment week fifty years ago were effectively murdered. The details are here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nCC4npKUMq/Entirely-innocent. I’ve written about this shameful affair many times, as I have about the murderers responsible, the British army’s Parachute Regiment. But it’s too easy to blame them and them alone: their brutality and their taste […]

Independent-minded people looking at the many one-sided anti-Israel demonstrations over the Gaza disaster must now conclude that the explanation for them is a widespread and deeply held anti-Semitism. The laws on legitimate military action are very simple. It is a violation of the Geneva convention to use occupied civilian buildings such as schools and hospitals as cover for military operations. It is another violation of the Geneva convention to fire munitions indiscriminately into civilian areas. Hamas has systematically done both. […]

Contemplating the hideous events in Israel and Gaza, my mind is inexorably drawn to the seaside resort of Dun Laoghaire. What intellectual calamity befell that sorry borough that it should have chosen to elect Richard Boyd Barrett its TD? Was its population deprived of vitamins in their childhood? Did a pocket of radioactivity from Chernobyl land there and scramble the brains of the electorate? Did a bunch of Nazis settle in the area in 1945 after hearing de Valera’s reassuringly […]

The purge continues. With Eoghan Harris on the tumbril, and with Irish Times columnists once again baying in sanctimonious glee as he’s hauled away, the area of freedom remaining in Irish journalism is about the width of a narrow-gauge railway.  The tracks have been set this close together by an extraordinary alliance of dedicated Sfira fascists, sabre-toothed PC liberals and the Kingstown & Dalkey Children’s Woke Brigade. The few plucky commentators who remain outside those tracks – such as Eilis […]