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Bloody Friday, July 21 1972, when twenty-one IRA bombs killed nine people in Belfast and injured one hundred and thirty, many grievously and permanently, is one of the most important days in Irish history. However, what makes it important is not what happened that day, but what didn’t happen thereafter. What should have followed was a tidal wave of revulsion sweeping through nationalist Ireland, in its heartlands in the North and through all the fabric and the institutions of the […]

The Young May Moon, the anthem of the RIC, echoed with sombre gaiety through the Guards Chapel on the Mall upon the eve of the month of May. Those present were aware of the deep ignominy of the event, for we had just learnt that the Embassy was not represented there, and two Garda superintendents who had intended to wear their uniforms had just received direct orders from the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, not to do so. A month […]

On June 6th, 2017, the 73rd anniversary of the Normandy landings, as a pioneer journalist in the study of the Irish who served against the Third Reich, I made an address in Monkstown Church of Ireland Church in honour of the memory of the Irishmen and women of the allied forces in the Second World War. This is what I said. Each June, a pot of shamrock mysteriously appears in the cemetery in the little Normandy churchyard of Toufreville. It […]

UDR Declassified  (Merrion) by Micheal Smith Review by Kevin Myers In his introduction to this wretched book, Colin Wallace, the former British army press officer in Lisburn quotes from an article in Hibernia magazine that appeared in 1975. By 1973, (Jim) Hanna had become the senior military commander for the UVF in Northern Ireland. He had become a close friend of Captains Anthony Ling and Anthony Box and Lieutenant Alan Homer, all of 39th Brigade at Lisburn, and a Timothy Golden who is […]

The mole-rat is a most extraordinary mammal. It lives underground and is almost completely blind and bald. It is cold-blooded so its body-temperature is the same as its surroundings. It feels no pain, can survive on tiny amounts of oxygen and can go backwards as fast as it goes forwards. Mole-rat communities feed their young with faecal pap, which is exactly what you think it is. The only human event that compares with a colony of these blind, shit-eating, backward-travelling, […]

No posts have appeared in this space for a while because I have become numb with horror. A catastrophic mood has taken hold of the Irish people. The only hope is that moods can change – but change can only happen when reason prevails, and ‘reason’ is now a barely evident quality in Irish life. This has usually moved in electoral cycles over the decades, but there are other cycles that are apparently driven by larger and darker forces. These […]

The constitutional crisis that is assailing Ireland today is because there is no constitutional crisis. The political classes and most of the media have refused to defend the Constitution against President Higgins’ gross interference with its intent and its integrity. In the process, he has deliberately insulted the Northern Unionists with his refusal to attend a church service in Armagh to commemorate a century of partition. Far from being a celebration of partition, as has been widely implied in the […]

The very intentional slight by President Higgins to the Unionist people by personally refusing to attend the centenary commemorations of the foundation of the Northern State is an event of enormous significance. It marks the capture of the centre-ground of Irish life by the Sinn Fein value-system, which boycotts rather than seeks any accommodation with alternative forms of Irishness. “Ourselves Alone” now finally means just that. This identity-fascism has not just conquered the Aras. Many of you will have read […]

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 […]