Journalist, author, broadcaster
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 […]
In May, ‘the Rocky Road to Poland’, Ireland’s official song for the European Championships, debuted at number one in the Irish singles chart. A rather cumbersome 9/8 beat aside, the Rocky Road to Poland is standard team song fare: a mix of famous faces (the Dubliners), folksy humour (rhyming ‘Opel Corsa’ with ‘Warsaw’) and winsome, […]
In 1928, the scion of 20th century British economics John Maynard Keynes addressed a room full of Cambridge undergraduates on the subject of ‘economic possibilities for our grandchildren’. Keynes – a far more radical thinker than contemporary caricatures of him as the stolid grandfather of ‘tax and spend’ economics suggest – told his audience that, thanks […]
In December 1946, the French polymath and bon vivant Boris Vian, and his wife, threw a soirée in their Paris apartment. It was a boozy, bawdry affair, an intentional throwback to the all-night parties that raged in Occupied Paris. In one corner sat phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, across the room was his bête noire, the author Arthur Koestler. Simone de […]
‘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 […]
Iceland is often held up as the poster child for an alternative approach to the global crisis, but how accurate are the stories about the Nordic nation? My London Review of Books blog took a look. In April, a video entitled ‘Iceland forgives mortgage debt of its population’ went viral. The 30-second clip, a Spanish-language news broadcast […]
IF you had wanted to see the movers and shakers in Edinburgh this week, it would have cost you £3,850, writes Peter Geoghegan If you did find yourself with just shy of four grand burning a hole in your pocket, would you spend it all on a ticket for a four-day conference on “radical openness”? […]