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For Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of the political wing of the IRA to have praised the man who in 1939 created the alliance between the IRA and the Third Reich can only mean one of four alternatives. One, she is profoundly stupid. Two, she is profoundly mad. Three, she is profoundly wicked. Four. There is no fourth alternative. But this is not the discussion that is now besetting the Irish media and political class. No, to the immense satisfaction […]

Take your pick. Which President Biden would you prefer? The one who fell three times getting up the steps into Air Force One? The one who referred to “President Harris”? Or the one who promised flight-suits for pregnant women in the armed forces? The deal of a lifetime! You get three for the price of one, and better still, at no extra cost, President Biden has promised to update military equipment to allow for servicewomen’s changing hairstyles. Wunderbar! Had this […]

Unanimous votes usually have a slight tang of “Our Beloved Leader” about them, so at best they should be treated with caution. Still, putting aside the common Irish desire to comply with the consensus – that most Beloved of all Leaders in Irish life – the unanimous vote within the Irish Commission on the Future of the Irish Media in support of Alan Rusbridger reminds us that feminism as a coherent movement in defence of women is dead. What it […]

I don’t want to write about this, mostly because you probably won’t want to read another bloody word about Covid, which is not exactly why I go to the trouble of… et cetera. But what precisely is going on when the only resistance to the insane rules now governing us come from the sort of people for whom the old padded-cells at Grangegorman should be re-opened and Albert Pierrepoint given his job back? Where is the voice of reason? Where […]

Today is International Women’s Day, a day when we should all reflect on the words of Our Beloved Leader, Mr Gerard Adams, on the issue of women’s rights. Two years ago, OBL declared: “A range of surveys over the years have shown that one-third of women surveyed were victims of sexual of (sic) physical violence. This is a shocking and harrowing fact…Women on the island of Ireland have won many battles for equality over the past century but there are […]

There was I, gazing in expectation at my Bakelite phone with its lovely old dial, waiting for it to ring as excited journalists sought my reaction to the stunning news: Roy Greenslade had finally outed himself an IRA-agent. For Greensleeze has been the foremost media “analyst” in these islands for three decades. He has had a home in Donegal for much of that time, and throughout this period he has set himself up as a sort of moral guardian of […]

Firstly, this space does not join witch-hunts for reasons which might be obvious to its few readers, and if I even suspected one was gathering, I’d stay silent. Secondly, following two recent columns, I am not trying to habitually, ahem, harass an Uachtarain. But we – not a royal plural, but a generic which applies to its readers as much as it does to its author – like to see the truth. This not a commodity which is being sought […]