Author, Blogger, Journalist & Writer
I am sure that the recent crop of hagiographies masquerading as obituaries would have nauseated and delighted the late Conor Cruise O’Brien in equal measure. He was brilliant, complex and difficult man. Whatever, or whoever, he was he was certainly significant. In the Irish Independent (30/12/2008. www.unison.ie) Kevin Myer’s memoir of his first meeting with the “Cruiser” was doubly interesting because it recalled an incident told by the Cruiser himself in his seminal “States of Ireland”. Published in 1972 I read the book in the 1980s. One incident stayed with me long after I had put the book down and …
This site started in the summer of 2006 as an archive of my work in print journalism. The work stretches back to the 1980s and there is still work to be scanned and uploaded, but we’re getting there. My ambitions for the site in 2008 was to develop a blog and encourage traffic to the site. The hits to this site started in the hundreds at the start of the year they are now in the hundreds of thousands. I have a strict policy of not responding to the posts that I approve on the site. That policy will continue …
EXCLUSIVE
By Phil Mac Giolla Bhain
A controversial Scottish churchman tonight slammed the well-loved Irish ballad “The Field of Athenrye” as “ vile, vicious and racist” and compared the Pete St. John ballad to the infamous “Famine Song.”
Reverend Stuart MacQuarrie is part of the chaplaincy service at Glasgow University and he made the outburst on a BBC Radio 4 debate on Celtic Rangers rivalry on St.Stephen’s day night.
As the world celebrates the birth of a baby boy born in abject poverty. There is another infant that I haven’t been able to get out of my head all week. Baby P looks up at me in the picture everyone has seen and asks questions that no one in polite society seems to want to seriously answer. It has often been mentioned that there isn’t a resigning culture in Irish politics, that, unlike in the UK, people here cling onto their government positions as if their lives depended on it. In Britain, on the other hand, a chap falls …
Words are important; well you would expect a journalist and author to believe that. Words condition the response. Words have baggage. Words are never ever neutral. Never. I have been thinking about this increasingly since writing the last blog about Eoin Ryan’s visit to Scotland. The visit had been arranged after Alyn Smith MEP had heard Eoin Ryan raise the issue of the Famine Song controversy in the European parliament. Ryan had been very precise in the use of this language when raising TFS issue. This was a problem of racism and, to further press home that point, Ryan had …
Sociologists have a term for what an outsider does to a society just by being there. The stranger conducts a “commonsense inventory”. This is not a conscious act, but just because the outside has not been socialised into that system they have an effect of making everyone there consider what is the accepted wisdom. Eoin Ryan the Fianna Fail MEP from Dublin caused official Scotland to carry out a common sense inventory last Thursday in Scotland. I was there to witness the event. Eoin Ryan had raised the anti-Irish racism in Scotland as manifested by the singing of the …
