Month: June 2009

It was hard not to feel for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with his toe curling Freudian slip at the D-Day commemoration. His reference to “Obama beach” was sadly emblematic of the way in which the UK’s role in the liberation of Europe has been written out of the celluloid historical record. From being disappeared by Hollywood from the naval intelligence war that cracked the enigma codes to the D-Day landings. Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” manages one mention of the British contribution to the biggest amphibious landing in history. It is one line of script that has Tom Hanks …

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Does discrimination in employment against Irish people exist in Britain today? The Irish in Britain of a certain age can recall in-your-face job discrimination. The West of Scotland of my boyhood was full of anecdotes about major employers from Shipyards to banks who didn’t employ anyone from the Irish community. However the plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence”. My new view on encountering the question that started this article would be an emphatic “no”. Moreover the answer would have been “no” for at least several decades. If someone claims that there is some structural discrimination going on in this day …

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Kevin McDaid has been laid to rest. His funeral, like all funerals, was an occasion of sadness, but this was complicated grief. Complicated by the fact that Kevin was murdered. The cortege stopped and was silent and still at the spot where Rangers supporters had repeatedly jumped on his head last Sunday as they celebrated their team’s league triumph by killing a taig. Across the river the silence was broken as a loyalist band played the anthems of hate as the cortege stopped Was this an utterly cruel coincidence or a calculated mark of disrespect? Given the sickness that infects …

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