Gerry Kelly’s solicitors have served me with a libel writ. Published: 21 June 2022 For legal reasons, I can’t yet say publicly what he’s upset about except that I think it’s ridiculous and I’m standing by what I wrote because I believe it is true. I did the same when,...
Being President Higgins means never having to say you are sorry. Published: 21 June 2022 Nothing seems to shake this life-long Marxist’s remarkable and unjustified self-belief. He’s just dropped two enormous clangers — but he won’t admit it. He has plenty of form, of...
I couldn’t stand Piers Morgan until he lost his job on Good Morning Britain for telling the truth about Meghan Markle Published: 10 May 2022 Then I overlooked his crassness, praised his moral courage and wished him well in his new job with Talk TV. But the honeymoon...
I’ve only been a declared unionist for a very short while and already I’m a Lundy. Published: 12 April 2022 Most recently this accusation has been levelled at me over a tweet I wrote the other day in response to the defaced poster of Doug Beattie showing him with a...
Sadly, Sinn Fein is perhaps the closest to power of all the populist movements in Europe that have displayed unhealthy sympathies for Russia Published: 15 March 2022 Last week, caught on the hop by the behaviour of Vladimir Putin, for whom it has a soft spot, Sinn...
Some unintended consequences of Vladimir Putin’s megalomaniacal and merciless attack on the people of Ukraine that are appearing in Ireland now are embarrassing Sinn Fein. Published: 15 March 2022 Owing to having been brought up and educated in Dublin, and then spent...
I apologise to those readers who hate Twitter, but awful though it can be, it’s a fact of life and like all political journalists I have to read it. Published: 15 February 2022 Last week’s highlights for me were not the usual entertainment of Shinnerbots spewing...
I don’t like being labelled, but after covering Northern Ireland as a journalist for almost 30 years, I can now formally announce I am no longer a political agnostic: I am a unionist. Being from a Dublin Catholic mostly-soft-nationalist background and living in...
Last week I was on Talkback disagreeing with the journalist Susan McKay about her charge that Kate Hoey was sectarian — one piece of evidence being that Hoey had attended “a barbecue for the extremist TUV party” (as she wrote in an Irish Times article on January 8)....
Doug Beattie, leader of the UUP, and Mary Lou McDonald, president of Sinn Fein, were in the United States last week. Published: 7 December 2021 Separately, they met many of the same people and addressed several of the same New York and Washington audiences, but they...