Real reconciliation with the orange in our tricolour must mean more than just indifference
When I wrote here last week about the spirit of the “Chuckle Brothers” being needed for a resolution of the impasse that has left Northern Ireland without a government and without a functioning assembly, I was not conscious that Martin McGuinness was about to join Ian Paisley in eternity, although I knew he was very […]
We need a realistic and honest debate on the type of Europe we aspire to now
The draft EU guidelines for negotiating Brexit are a welcome first offer in the process by which the departure of the UK from the European Union will be negotiated. It is, of course, a little artificial for a negotiating strategy to be developed in public and in the full gaze of the other party to […]
My trip across the invisible border provided a new perspective on North-South issues
On Friday I travelled to Belfast to unveil a plaque to commemorate Eoin Mac Néill’s birth 150 years ago this year and his lengthy residence as a secondary student and undergraduate at St Malachy’s College in Belfast from 1881 to 1887. When he arrived there, as John Mc Neill from Glenarm in Antrim at the […]
Minister Fitzgerald’s attempt to push Sexual Offences Bill through the Seanad in one afternoon is shameful
On Wednesday the 15th of February at the old League of Nations building in Geneva, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) will be addressed by an Irish Government delegation which it is planned, at the time of writing, will be headed by Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald, Minister for Justice and […]
Leadership contests and the strong, silent coalition against reform
Maybe all is not lost for President Trump. A column in the latest edition of the well-produced, deeply conservative Irish fortnightly newspaper, The Catholic Voice, is calling on all its readers to pray for Donald Trump so that he may not be deflected by the wave of criticism from anti-Christian media from pursuing his policies. […]
Is Mark Zuckerberg the most modern of the evangelists?
In an IT age I suppose it is almost inevitable that a somewhat binary perspective on reality should suggest itself to Mark Zuckerberg, who has just published his Facebook manifesto, as a vision of a better world. The “either or” or “1 and zero” underpinning of the software programmer’s language is almost bound to translate […]