The lost Orange of Ireland

Royal Black Preceptory Parade, Cootehill, Cavan, 1920

In a previous post I noted that Martin McGuinness said in March 2015 that "The orange part of the flag is as important as the green", and Gerry Adams said at his party’s Ard Fheis that same year that "We need reminded again and again that our flag is Orange."

Kevin Myers speaks to the #NorthernIreland2016 Interview Project

Kevin Myers is a veteran journalist of the Troubles and Irish politics. He is a respected polemicist and historian. He was heavily responsible for bringing  the Irishmen who fought in the First World War back into the consciousness of modern Ireland. He writes a fortnightly column for the Sunday Times.

2016 is a time for national embarrassment, Ctd

Kevin Myers wrote in the Sunday Times of August 11 2013:

"The surreal tone to this year's MacGill Summer School was established at its opening ceremony, as the Taoiseach declared: "To be a real republic, Ireland has to be a sovereign republic." What? Sovereign? After surrendering vast swathes of legislative and financial independence to Europe? Has the man gone mad?"

Previous post on this topic featuring Fintan O'Toole here.

When its cool to be dumb, Ctd

Irish Independent columnist Kevin Myers wrote in the August 18 2013 edition of the Sunday Times:

"Many working-class communities cherish a deep hostility towards any upward mobility, which is enforced by a variety of societal pressures so as to make the bright conform with failure. This perverse culture even had a laureate, Roddy Doyle, whose novels celebrated such weird and negative norms. What in other countries would be regarded as antisocial lunacies, in Doyle's fictional Barrytown were fetishised into a vainglorious victimhood."