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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 […]

THE official confirmation by the Historical Enquiries Team of collusion in the Miami Showband massacre of 1975 should surprise no one. It was widely known that UDR members of the UVF were involved and there was no serious attempt at the time to cleanse the UDR of loyalist terrorists. This was an utter scandal. But it doesn’t stop there. Most of the UVF men responsible for the Miami massacre had probably been involved in the Dublin bombings the year before. […]

It was a shame that Europe waited until I was away before it fell apart, for I feel sure that my counsel might have been of some use to the German Chancellor, Helmut Merkel, or the French President, Signore Punchinello. For a start, I should certainly advise Herr Merkel to do something about his tailor, for the rascal is giving his suits the strangest cut. Jackets should not normally reveal the bottom (especially one as ample as his) unless one […]

Before I took a week’s leave, I wrote a column on suicide, which I finished: “And since we can, quite rightly, no longer use the crude force of a pagan taboo as a control over people’s lives, then we must extol the positive. . .” The headline-writer duly summarised these words as follows: “Suicide is self-murder and must remain taboo.” Well, we’ve all had bad days at the office, but at least most of us are then held accountable for […]

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 […]

If you want a sense of how utterly unrelated to reality our modern political class remains, it was in the recent declaration by the “Minister for Primary Care” (oh please) Roisin Shortall that the government would introduce “free” GP treatment for all by 2015 and universal health insurance in 2016. The following year, no doubt, the government will eliminate our dependency on oxygen, following the Equality Tribunal’s finding that it is discriminatory. The year after that, all children will be […]

The Filmbase arts centre in Dublin is set today to be the scene of the latest in the latest of the irrational and phobic demonstrations against Israel, led by Raymond Deane, who rejoices in the most Orwellian of titles, “Cultural Boycott Officer” for the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Whatever you call this, it is freedom of neither speech nor of movement if anti-Israeli opinions are backed with coercion and pickets. But it is all like some grotesque screenplay that Monty […]