An Sionnach Fionn

11/01/2024

Genocide. It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Apparently...

06/11/2023

versus - a must-watch two-part confrontation between the British presenter and the Egyptian satirist over the war in Gaza

Two weeks ago the exiled Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef took part in a live online debate with Piers Morgan, the conservative British TV presenter, that ignited something of a firestorm on the in…

30/10/2023

When Europeans or Americans ask why the Irish identify or sympathise so much with the Palestinian cause. Because when you know, you know...

22/10/2023

Some thoughts on the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, and the latest bloody chapter in the Palestinian and Israeli conflict

There are relatively few events that could persuade me to leave my voluntary retirement from the intellectual hard graft of political blogging. However, the appalling events in the state of Israel …

21/06/2023

The summer solstice - it's downhill from here on, folks! 😉

21/06/2023

Well, that created some furore on Twitter! 😁 Who woulda thunk that the same people lobbying for Ireland to abandon neutrality and join NATO are the same people who ardently defend the history of Britain's Dirty War in Ireland? It's almost as if there were some sort of political or ideological connection there. Or something... 😉

10/04/2023

General Liam Lynch, Chief-of-Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), fatally wounded by rifle fire from soldiers of the Irish National Army (INA) in the Knockmealdown Mountains, died in captivity on the evening of the 10th of April 1923 in nearby Clonmel, aged 30. With his death the defence of the revolutionary Irish Republic effectively collapsed and the imposition of the counter-revolutionary Irish Free State was achieved on behalf of the British-supported Free State regime in Dublin. His body lay in state until his funeral some days later, protected by an honour guard of volunteers from the Cumann na mBan, the republican women's movement.

20/08/2021

Ignore the dishonest neoliberal and neoconservative hawks in the US, UK and elsewhere now making common cause and advocating a Forever War in Afghanistan - the end result will still be the same, a year or a hundred years from now

I thought I would post this interesting discussion of recent events in Afghanistan published on the American politics’ podcast, The Realignment. Hosted by centre-right journalists Marshall Ko…

27/06/2021

With the s**t show that is the by-election in Dublin Bay South still gurgling away, casting the main parties – and some of the main candidates – in a less than flattering light, the rea…

24/06/2021

So here we go again. Ten years of successive leaders in the Democratic Unionist Party being hailed by the usual media suspects in Ireland and the United Kingdom as the “moderate” face o…

17/05/2021

"Both groups are “warning” of civil unrest by the “people of Northern Ireland” – by which they mean the minority of voters who support an uncompromising version of Brexit – in protest at those aspects of the UK trading and customs arrangements with the European Union that protect the Irish-British peace process. And they are issuing these alarms in such a way as to all but incite the very thing they are supposedly warning against."

As I have noted several times before, when it comes to loyalist violence in the north of Ireland, while British and unionist terrorists may pull the triggers it is British and unionist politicians …

15/05/2021

"...one can’t help but wonder if the speculation that Edwin Poots has no intention of taking up the office of First Minister in the northern executive in order to concentrate on “reforming” the party, leaving the role to one of his deputies, is a sign that the DUP is intent on reducing the status or importance of the cross-community administration at Stormont..."

Following a decade of sympathetic coverage by journalists and commentators pushing the narrative that the Democratic Unionist Party was truly interested in “outreach” to moderate pro-un…

09/05/2021

...Leaving the ever-more urgent constitutional question, also applicable to this country, still to be asked: "If not now, when?"

The largest number of votes submitted in an election for the Scottish parliament and the largest tally of support recorded by pro-independence parties in an election for the Scottish parliament, ye…

07/05/2021

"Eoghan has accepted that he was one of the founders of the account. He has also stated to me that he was ‘one of a group of people that contributed to a Barbara Pym entity'."

Yesterday’s late breaking news that the controversial right-wing newspaper columnist and so-called “revisionist” author Eoghan Harris has been sacked by his bosses for collaborating with a “group o…

06/04/2021

"Given the long historical shadow of cultural and linguistic destruction hanging over this country, where native speakers of the Irish language now number in the low tens of thousands out of an island-wide population of several million, it is an issue that should perhaps concern and outrage our political and activist classes a lot more than it does"

The YouTube politics’ channel Bad Empanada has published a video examining some of the evidence supporting the charge that the People’s Republic of China is engaged in a massive, years-…

05/04/2021

"If one of the main leaders of the pro-union minority in the north-east of the island is by implication claiming that her community has no place in a reunited state and would be forced to abandon their homes... then one can only imagine what perilous seeds are being planted in the minds of ordinary people who presently identify as solely unionist and British."

When Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and joint First Minister of Northern Ireland, told a BBC documentary in 2018 that she would “probably have to move” in th…

05/04/2021

"...a more important factor in the initial rioting was the need by the Ulster Defence Association, the formerly legal British terrorist organisation, to express its anger at attempts by the UK authorities to crack down on its criminal financing, with the Police Service of Northern Ireland targeting the UDA’s control of drug-dealing, racketeering, sex-trafficking and extortion in a number of loyalist areas"

During some of the most difficult days of the nascent Irish-British peace process the late bomb-maker turned peace-maker David Ervine, head of the Progressive Unionist Party and political represent…

28/03/2021

An SNP psychodrama played out on the national stage or a radical change that could yield a pro-independence supermajority at Holyrood?

It’s over a week since I suggested that “…none of us can predict what the suddenly unpredictable Alex Salmond might do next”, and sure to form the embattled ex-leader of the…

28/03/2021

Bernadette takes on America's leading proto-Reganite WASP and some fellow "Anglo-Saxons" from Britain in a fascinating, subliminally racist 1972 television encounter...

I thought some of my fellow political anoraks might be interested in this appearance by a young Bernadette Devlin McAliskey on Firing Line, the long-running American current affairs show hosted fro…

19/03/2021

What a bizarre situation we’ve reached in the politics of Scotland when we have elements of the Greater England press in London making common cause with their previous bête noire, Alex Salmond, in …

13/03/2021

Despite all the travails of Brexit and Covid-19, just a few short weeks ago the political future of the Scottish National Party was looking bright. Riding high in the polls and with the option of i…

11/03/2021

Leo Varadkar: “[Sinn Féin is] sectarian. They are anti-British. They have no Protestant TDs, MLAs, or Senators."

Given the patently racist accusations made against him by right-wing British journalists and publications over the years, with allegations of an exaggerated sense of Irishness due to his ethnically…

05/03/2021

Susan McKay: "As the Proud Boys are to Trump, so the loyalist paramilitaries are to the Democratic Unionist Party..."

As I wrote a few weeks ago, during the decades of the so-called Troubles while unionist terrorists may have pulled the triggers it was unionist politicians who pointed the guns. Yes, the close inst…