Seamus Heaney was three years older than me and a senior boarder when I was a dayboy at St Columb’s College in the 1950s. There was a well established precept that you ignored all those in the years below, even siblings, if at all possible. The
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I first met John in 1972 in Bert Mullen’s Drumchapel home where I was sharing my experience as a director of Derry Credit Union during the sixties. He was one of a group of enthusiastic credit union pioneers, led by Bert, Bill Murphy and the
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Explaining in Glasgow University , why he thought that credit union growth in Britain had been much weaker than that of Ireland, Nobel Laureate, John Hume, said he felt that its leaders had “an unhealthy proximity to the whims of Government”. Intervention, announced today
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This long spell of fine weather has provided a cast iron excuse for lazing around and reading. It has always been the real purpose of holidays for me. In days of yore, when as a family we set off annually for a rural gîte, I
Read more →Liz and I took advantage of the fine weather with a short break at St. Fillans on the eastern shore of Loch Earn this week. One afternoon, we sat by the Loch , enthralled as a pair of osprey dived and fished in great swoops for over
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I watched two TV programmes back-to-back last night, the first on RTE was ‘Thatcher – Ireland and the Iron Lady’, followed by a BBC documentary in the ‘Imagine’ series on photographer, Don McCullin. While the subjects were quite contrasting personalities, the programmes shared common themes – attitudes
Read more →My job for the last seven years before retirement involved me in frequent air travel, sometimes on a weekly basis. I spent a lot of enforced time hanging about in transit lounges. We are told that Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower , is permanently stuck in
Read more →“though it was a hard birth I had with every one of them and they coming to the world “ The quotation is from “Riders to the Sea”, Synge’s lyrical depiction of a careworn mother and her hopeless struggle with the sea. Our youngest child, Fiona, gave birth
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The Scottish Education Secretary, Michael Russell, MSP, yesterday addressed the AGM of the Educational Institute of Scotland. He is a man impermeable to doubt, possessing a rhetorical style that suggests he learned compound verbs on his mother’s knee before he learned to walk. However, in the presence
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I have held an Irish passport for all of my adult life, although I have not lived there since 1971. Ireland shaped me and I hope that I remain today essentially an Irish person, albeit one probably modified by the cultural influence of other countries where I
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