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Apologia pro vita sewer: I can honestly look back at almost all my opinions, both those passionately held within me and the ambient ones that I abjectly assimilated from my peers, and say I was on the effluent side of most arguments. My post-war generation inherited a world that had been liberated from the Nazis at huge personal cost and was being protected against communism, yet we threw it all away. We abandoned our birth-right. We sneered at the values […]

It’s a measure of how deep the fang of PC linguistic compliance has sunk into the soft tissue of the English language that even the enemies of wokeness are using the very words that torpedo their own arguments. In last week’s The Spectator David Patriparakos referred to a Taliban “spokesperson”, and two days later, the Free Speech Union similarly reported the words of the Taliban’s “spokesperson”, Zabihullah Muhajid. It then further compounded that idiocy with: “We also learned this week […]

Shortly before the US Presidential election, the headline in the Pravda of this era, The New York Times, was richer in dark truths than its author could have intended: “60% of people named Karen are voting for Biden.” People, not women. One can’t say the w-word anymore lest the psychotic transgender inclusivists tear you limb from pretty limb, like a Taliban execution squad with a brace of 120 cc motorbikes dealing with a gender-studies lecturer in downtown Kabul. That’s not […]

The news might well have been arriving on one of those old-fashioned teletype machines, as you tear off a strip and read: Oregon governor abolishes reading, writing and arithmetic for high school certificates. The machine pauses, then bursts into life again. She also orders that all pupils and staff of every single school in the state must wear masks at all times, inside and out. Are you serious? I am. Oregon has declared literacy to be racist. Toddlers aged two […]

Fifty years ago this morning, in the greatest act of insanity any European state has perpetrated within its own national borders since the Second World War, the British government launched an entirely illegal and often criminal assault on its own citizens in Northern Ireland. Hundreds of men were taken from their beds and dragged off to detention centres. Many were beaten. Some were put through mock executions – either involving phony firing squads or being pushed blindfolded out of the […]

The most terrifying thing about Ireland today is the abject compliance that unites politicians, journalists, academics, trade unionists, teachers, clergy and civil servants. The oracles of political correctness merely have to utter their Valleyspeak gibberish, and these groups cravenly submit. This is the Irish version of a political pandemic in a globalised world, which God help me, I initially welcomed, not learning the lessons from the AIDS epidemic: states without borders are in their own way every bit as vulnerable […]

So farewell July, when our political classes finally abandoned the Constitution as a rulebook and Irish journalism took another two steps towards its much-deserved grave. One was the wicked destruction of the career of the rugby pundit Neill Francis and the other was the studied neglect of the Percy French Summer School.  The month began with Declan Ganley’s (barely reported) court case against the state for its draconian and unconstitutional closure of all places of worship last year. Constitutions are […]