Sorcha Óg You arrived Sorcha with the dawn on the fifteenth of June, another bairn for Scotland, a sister for Leo and Senan, a daughter for Jen and Neill , another grandchild, a burst of radiance in this gilded summer. Your Gaelic name means ‘light’ and you
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Growing up in Ireland, the Paupers’ Field and the Polo Field were our childhood play areas. As children, the emotional overtones did not register with us nor did any real distinction occur between the two grounds. Seventy years later , I find those memories strangely relevant to
Read more →Reaching out to people and touching their lives, is not instinctive human activity. It is learned and practiced behaviour. Not all of us are capable of committing to it nor, indeed, do we wish to have any appreciable level of involvement in the lives of others. Only
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Sajid Javid has proposed that all holders of public office should take an oath of allegiance to British values. What those values are, or represent, is not specifically defined but some ribald suggestions have surfaced on the internet from warm pints of bitter to mushy peas. Given
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Pupils seeking examples of irony for their Higher English prelims should forsake Shakespeare and read Tim Shipman’s book , ‘All Out War’; it is a Brexit tale that deftly describes the deals, betrayals and broken promises that laid low much of the recognisable, political class in Britain.
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A newsletter in Church today carried a piece by a recently deceased priest on a French, Trappist monk, Charles de Foucauld, who is a candidate for beatification and the late author was one of those involved in the presentation of his cause to the Vatican. De Foucauld,
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‘ The Prime Minister should stop “obsessing” about grammar schools and order a massive expansion of vocational education to address skills shortages that will worsen after Brexit’; not my words but those of Michael Wilshaw, the Head of Ofsted, whose job is to advise the Government on standards
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Conflicted probably best summarises my thoughts in the aftermath of the Brexit Vote. Given the trajectory of my political and social development , I should be unspeakably delighted that GB jumped off a cliff into the mire on June 23rd; the very public humiliation of a British Prime
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Bishop Eddie Daly’s first ministry was as curate in St Patrick’s Castlederg; I began my teaching career there at St Eugene’s Secondary School. He would have been very aware , as I was, of the extent of rural poverty and deprivation in the surrounding area. Nevertheless, his
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There was a collection in church today for the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF). It is intended to relieve famine conditions which threaten 12million people in seven countries of Southern Africa. The El Nino weather phenomenon, one of the worst in 50 years, has caused intense
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