Krystal Ball of the YouTube show Rising and Kyle Kulinski of the popular channel Secular Talk, have launched a new podcast, Krystal Kyle & Friends, that is well worth a subscription. The third episode is available on YouTube and features an in-depth discussion with Thomas Frank, the encyclopedic left-wing historian and journalist. The conversation covers…
Threats? What threats? That is the question on a lot of minds as scepticism continues to grow about recent claims of intimidation against local officials in the port of Larne and the city of Belfast who were working, however tangentially, on administrating the so-called Irish Sea border between Ireland and the post-Brexit United Kingdom. As…
The current furore in the London press over an article by the veteran British journalist and newspaper editor Roy Greenslade in the British Journalism Review describing his sympathies with the Irish republican cause as a consequence of reporting on Britain’s “dirty war” in Ireland during the so-called Troubles of 1966-2005, particularly the Bloody Sunday massacre…
Most independence movements have the good sense to achieve independence before starting the civil war. Not so the Scottish National Party which is currently embroiled in a very public and very personal internecine bloodletting between the current leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her larger-than-life predecessor Alex Salmond. With a string of polls showing…
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 institutional link that latterly existed between the military and political wings of the (Provisional) Republican movement did not exist within the pro-union…
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 mixed parentage, one would imagine that Leo Varadkar might be acutely sensitive to the false stereotyping of any minority person or community in this country. Unfortunately…
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 independence enjoying unprecedented levels of support, it seemed that the forthcoming regional elections in May were going to give Nicola…
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 their campaign to attack, discredit and ultimately bring down the current leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon. And quite possibility…
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 from the mid 1960s to the late ’90s by the conservative journalist and author William F. Buckley Jr. This episode was recorded in March 1972…
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 Scottish National Party surprised friend and foe alike last Friday with the launch of his new Alba Party. Or so it seemed to me….