Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Posted in:
Unthinkable suffering The Syrian army’s apparent chemical attack on Douma on April 7 was the worst atrocity of an infernal six-week military campaign in Eastern Ghouta. This in turn was the latest horrific chapter in a war lasting seven years which has brought unthinkable suffering to millions of innocent civilians. The relentless bombardment of Eastern […]
The Westminster terrorist attack on 22 March of last year, by lone attacker, Khalid Masood (52), who drove a car into pedestrians and fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer, is not the first time that terrorists have selected the Palace of Westminster, and its surrounds, to perpetrate an act of violence. 39 years ago, on 30 March […]
Posted in:
North Oxford is a heartland of academia where leafy halls of residence mingle with stately homes and rarefied hostelries. Situated in almost the very centre of Britain a windless calm favours scholarly reflection removed from modernity’s fugue. Even the traffic is orderly with bicycles sensibly preferred. It is one of the most attractive places in the […]
It is today widely believed that between Casement’s arrest and execution in 1916 the Black Diaries now held in the UK National Archives were clandestinely shown to in uential persons in order to disarm appeals for his reprieve. This belief was once again articulated by law professor Sean McConville on 2 June, 1916 at a Casement […]
Posted in:
Back in the 1960s I once stood on the plinth of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London, between Landseer’s lions, at a Connolly Association rally against anti-Catholic discrimination by the Northern Ireland Stormont regime. Lots of people were waving tricolours. Forty years later I spoke again in the same spot, at an anti-EU rally organised by […]
Commemorations for the centenary of the 1916 Rising are well underway. This anniversary is being marked in a much less sanitised way than previous significant Easter Week commemorations. This is very welcome. For far too long, ceremonies celebrating the 1916 Rising were based on a highly simplified, monochrome account of history: Rebels good, Brits bad, civilians […]
Much is made of the choice made by James Connolly to join the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) with the Irish Volunteers led by Pádraig Pearse for the Easter Rising in 1916. Across the British and European Left, notably but not exclusively among those on the side of the allies in World War I, there was […]
If Colonel Gadaffi were still running Libya there would not be mass migration across the Mediterranean, with thousands drowned because of unscrupulous traffickers. Gadaffi was guilty of the sin of all those secular dictators. He was too independent of ‘the West’. Britain and France, backed by America, bombed him out of existence. Their excuse was […]