Imagine you are shipwrecked and come ashore on a land you don't know. You are taken in by some kind people. You are naturally curious about where you are. So you start asking your hosts about the their country. Sooner or later you get round to politics. The conversation could go like this:
One family's history over two centuries in Scotland and Ireland through tumultuous times from ploughs to poppies and to a shattering of old beliefs.
I remember October 5th 1968 well. I was 14. I wrote an essay on the events in Derry in school. I wish I had kept it. No, on second thought maybe I don't. In my boy's mind events in Derry in October 1968 are always connected to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in America three … Continue reading Educated ignorance
If you accept that we increasingly live in a topsy-turvy world where many things are inverted - injustice is rewarded, might is right, good is bad and incompetence is competence - then you will also understand that we mistake words for actions. Politicians and spin merchants of all creeds use these twisted illusions of … Continue reading Who and what are the DUP?
Under the Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland politics became like a football match where neither team was sure which goal they should attack and which to defend. Now that particular game is over, the teams are wondering why they did not see things more clearly. The answer is they were spellbound by a master story-teller.
If you accept that the corporate media in these islands is heavily controlled; that this state (UK) routinely lies to its residents, it fought a long war to prevent a united Ireland and went to enormous lengths to achieve a political settlement within the union only 20 years ago, then you must question why the trigger words ‘united Ireland’ have been allowed back into public discourse with such force. What are they up to?
Everything in the Brexit negotiations was faked by the British Government. It was a piece of theatre. It was always a preparation for the coup de grace, the unilateral withdrawal from the EU and the establishment of a government of national unity - a one party state.
What little history I was taught in school during the sixties told me that I lived under a 'constitutional monarchy'. I was told that the exercise of the Divine Right of Kings - an absolute monarch - ended when Cromwell and his supporters beheaded King Charles I of England in 1649. Ever since the monarchy … Continue reading Living under an absolute monarchy
False flag events - events that are staged to appear different from what they really are - are nothing new. I believe the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in July 1690 was a false flag - a sham fight. Like any false flag event, in order to examine it objectively you must forget everything … Continue reading Battle of the Boyne and the sham fight
Northern Ireland - a region of the United Kingdom which it has until now largely been run as a colony - is publicly exposed as highly dysfunctional. Not only is its political class, or at least one half of it, seen to be highly incompetent, negligent and corrupt, abusing the system of devolved government; but more significantly, the local civil service has shown itself to be equally unsound. What do the British Government do?
Peter Robinson comes out of retirement to re-write history and his part in it. Are moves afoot for a comeback?
Northern Ireland is denied basic human rights granted to the rest of the UK and Ireland. Part of the price of the Union with Britain
Inherited beliefs. I think it is fair to say that most of our views are the result of the conditioning of the class, culture and family we are born into. Few people rebel against this. They may modify the views of their family and peers or stage a token teenage rebellion, but only a select … Continue reading End the Union – Crossing the Rubicon (or Coming Out)
It was a standing joke between them. Sam took a Bushmills and Sean a Jameson. They’d done it for over forty years, but they united around the Guinness. That seemed to cut across all creeds. “Parade gets smaller every year,” said Sam as they settled into the snug in the small bar in central Belfast … Continue reading When the flyers came home
