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 […]
‘HIS PEN could lay bare the bones of a book or the soul of a statesman in a few vivid lines”. These words were written in praise of the man who founded the Sun newspaper: journalist, politician and Irish nationalist, TP O’Connor. The inscription appears, etched in brass, below a bust of a hirsute O’Connor […]
LEGAL action over an interview with a former IRA member may threaten our ability to record history, writes Peter Geoghegan. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” These words, penned more than a century ago by Spanish-American poet and essayist George Santayana, could have been written about Northern Ireland today. So […]
The people of Ireland have spoken. But what exactly have they said? The vote to accept the Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union – or, more snappily, the fiscal treaty – was certainly decisive: around three in every five ballots cast were in favour of the treaty. There were no great […]
ALMOST as soon as first ballot boxes were opened yesterday morning, it was clear the fiscal treaty referendum was not going to go the way of the rerun Nice and Lisbon votes. Just a handful of constituencies voted No, even then by small margins in most cases. Overall around three in every five ballots cast […]
Whatever voters decide on the stability treaty, the figures don’t add up, the words won’t last long and it won’t help the eurozone crisis, writes Peter Geoghegan Few people have had such a major impact on recent Irish political life – and yet remain so unknown, inside and outside the country – as Richard Crotty. […]
On Wednesday afternoon, excerpts from a speech by the Irish finance minister Michael Noonan to the Bloomberg Ireland Economic Summit in Dublin, purportedly copied from the Irish Times website, appeared on PoliticalWorld.org. The contributor, PaddyJoe, accused the newspaper of removing a paragraph from an earlier version of the story, in which Noonan, speaking about the […]
A middle-aged man with a Che Guevara beard and a black and white keffiyeh smiles down from an election poster attached to a lamppost in Gines, a middle class suburb on the outskirts of Seville. Below the photograph a single word instruction emblazoned in bright red ink: ‘Rebelate’. But there is little sign of rebellion […]
Last January 25, over 50,000 people occupied in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, in protest at the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Less than a week later, the number of protestors in the square and surrounding streets had swelled to more than one million. On February 11, Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt. On May 15, […]
In 1971, a parliamentary Working Group criticised the speed with which walls, gates and fences were being put up to separate Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. The ‘peace lines’, constructed mainly by the British army, were creating an ‘atmosphere of abnormality’, the Peace Walls Working Group warned. But they did ‘not expect any […]