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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 […]