Journalist, author, broadcaster
THE prospect of independence in Scotland is a world apart from the quashed Irish bid for home rule in 1912, writes Peter Geoghegan. “THE DARK eleventh hour draws on and sees us sold to every evil power we fought against of old.” So begins Rudyard Kipling’s poem Ulster 1912. Now fondly remembered as the hirsute […]
Concrete totems to Communist rule made into hostels and cafes or blown up – but should they be kept as reminder of past? For some, they are an ugly, podlike reminder of Albania‘s paranoid past that should be allowed to disappear unmourned. For others, the communist-era concrete bunkers that litter the small Adriatic state are a […]
THE conference that took place recently in the Kosovan capital Pristina to mark the end of the country’s supervised independence was billed as “chapter closed in the Balkans”. But away from the panel discussions and the diplomatic soirees, the atmosphere on Pristina’s streets was more subdued than celebratory. The end of the supervision of Kosovo’s […]
How George Robertson must regret saying in 1995 that ‘Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead.’ Robertson, then the shadow secretary of state for Scotland, was trying to appease sceptical unionists. Last weekend, 13 years after a devolved parliament was established at Holyrood, somewhere between 4000 and 10,000 people attended a ‘March and Rally for Scottish Independence’ in […]
Interview with American-Dominican novelist, appeared in the Sunday Business Post, September 2. Growing up in 1970s New Jersey, Junot Diaz was a self-confessed ‘book slut’. The young Dominican immigrant — his family arrived in the United States when he was just six — read everything from Richard Adams and Enid Blyton to graphic novels. At […]
IN THE wake of the 2008 crash, thousands of people are moving their accounts from the Big Five banks every month. Crisis? What crisis? The immortal phrase – created by a Sun journalist, but erroneously attributed to then prime minister Jim Callaghan – helped bring down a Labour government in 1979, but could as easily […]
The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels has been called ‘the last colonial museum in the world’. It’s not hard to see why: in the marble lobby a statue celebrates ‘Belgium bringing civilisation to the Congo’; the Memorial Room lists the names of the 1508 Belgians who died in Africa between 1876 and 1908 but doesn’t mention […]
Ian Wilson, a former Grand Master of the Orange Lodge in Scotland, addressed the annual Orange parade in Broughshane, Co. Antrim, on 12 July. After describing Martin McGuinness’s handshake with the queen as ‘a humiliating surrender’ for Sinn Fein, Wilson turned his anger on a ‘more cuddly and user-friendly’ nationalist: Alex Salmond. ‘The ultimate aim […]
Dissident republicans ‘intent to disrupt the peace process outstrips their capacity,’ a leading expert on paramilitaries in Northern Ireland has told the Sunday Business Post. Speaking in the wake of last week’s announcement that the Real IRA, Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD) and a loose collection of independent republican groups intend to form a coalition under […]
A new republican anti-ceasefire group in Northern Ireland is a threat, but its goals are likely to be unfulfilled, writes Peter Geoghegan In DECEMBER 1969, the Irish Republican Army held an extraordinary convention at Knockvicar house in Boyle, County Roscommon. During the preceding months, the Troubles had exploded into life across the border. Many rank […]