A look back at Ireland v France at the Millennium StadiumIain
The Irish fans went to Cardiff not knowing what to expect. France is the team that could beat New Zealand one week and lose to Italy the next. This was the Pool D crunch. Win, and it’s Argentina in the...
View Article‘The truth is to be sacrificed in Northern Ireland in the interest of...
In the current talks on dealing with the past the UK government is asserting a veto determining what will and will not be disclosed; this under the guise of ‘national security’ and despite the fact...
View Article‘Jim Allister, keep your divisive politics out of Ulster Rugby’– By Brian...
Ulster Rugby doesn’t do identity or politics. CEO Shane Logan has the mouths of the players and he has them bridled shut. Ulster Rugby is part of the proverbial fifth province. The place where the...
View ArticleTwenty Years on by Patrick McKeating
It was a day of firsts. The visit of President Clinton was the first time I heard the phrase ‘no stone unturned’. As 9 year olds we all had to write about the visit of the most powerful man in the...
View ArticleBrian John Spencer revisits Easter Monday 1916
The seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation Maurice Joy wrote in her account of Easter Monday 1916 that Dublin that morning “seemed as peaceful as any place on earth.” In contrast with the city at...
View ArticleBrian John Spencer’s dispatch on Day Six of the Easter Rising of 1916…
Edward ‘Ned’ Daly The weather on Saturday, like the events of that week, remain remarkably unseasonal. “It is astonishing that, thus early in the Spring, the weather should be so beautiful,” wrote...
View Article‘A terrible ignorance’– By Brian John Spencer
Easter, 1916 – a terrible beauty was born. It had a dark and little seen twin; a terrible ignorance of the people of the North. South of the border, the Easter Rising is almost universally acclaimed. A...
View Article‘Trying to find a new beat to which to march’– by Brian Rowan
A fortnight on from the Twelfth, you still hear a clear determination to end this marching standoff in the north Belfast. “A blueprint has been agreed,” one source commented in a reference to the...
View ArticleIs Secretary of State James Brokenshire at one with M15 asks CAJ’s Daniel...
Last month the Belfast Telegraph ran a three-day series of ‘Inside MI5’ articles on its front and inside pages. The paper reported it was the first media outlet to be invited to report from inside the...
View ArticleAnother ‘Edge of Society Man’– By Eamonn Mallie
He attended RBAI – read Law at Queen’s University, turned his back on all of this, took up a paint brush and a pen and opted for life in the raw in the streets of Belfast and Brooklyn New York. A new...
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