June 20 marks a strange anniversary in Irish history. On that date in 1631, north African corsairs, or pirates, raided the village of Baltimore on the west Cork coast and took at least 107 of the villagers captive to be sold as slaves in Algiers. Most of those abducted were part of an English settlement […]
For years, the history of abolitionism has been one of my keenest interests, especially as it has informed my work in the pro-life movement. The first chapter of my 2017 book Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion detailed the tactics used by abolitionists to confront the public with the truth about […]
June 20 marks a strange anniversary in Irish history. On that date in 1631, north African corsairs, or pirates, raided the village of Baltimore on the west Cork coast and took at least 107 of the villagers captive to be sold as slaves in Algiers. Most of those abducted were part of an English settlement […]
Part of the rationale for the Black Lives Matter kneel is to express either anger at the treatment of “people of colour”, if you are a person of colour, or alternatively remorse at the treatment, past present and future of people of colour if you are a white folk. One of those injustices obviously is […]
If this works out, then I’m looking forward to sending a personal bill to London for my share of the reparations owed for the famine, and other offences caused over the past 800 odd years. A west brit I may be, but I have my eye on getting a PlayStation five, and if reparations are […]
Who are the activists and the NGOs who have contributed to stirring up tensions in the past week, especially around the suggestion that bias might have motivated Garda actions leading to the death of George Nkencho? And why are so many of them funded by the hard-pressed Irish tax-payer? These people range from elected TDs […]
On Tuesday last, the Dáil allotted time to statements on the European Council of Ministers meeting that had ended on October 16. At a time when the Brexit negotiations and the Covid panic were exercising most minds, those topics took up the bulk of member’s contributions. Not so, Mick Barry the reticent communist TD for […]
One would imagine that the discovery of up to 10,000 slaves in a European city might have provoked a major response. Seemingly not, for following on from the Sun and Sunday Times exposure of such an abomination, there has been surprisingly little media or political attention devoted to it. On July 1 the Sun reported […]
The current debate over the extent of Irish “white privilege” and indeed responsibility for slavery has led to the revival of what has sometimes been an unseemly debate over whether the transportation of Irish people to the West Indies during the Cromwellian plantation constituted a form of slavery. Much of the debate over such matters […]
A strange contagion of self abasement and penitence has taken hold of the West. American politics and its jargon has invaded the consciousness of the world, even though we don’t share their political history or narratives. To use the terminology of the left, we have been psychologically colonised by American identity politics. Identity politics in […]
The global soul-searching over the issue of racism, contemporary and historic, that has taken place since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May has not escaped Ireland. It has taken many forms, some instructive, others less so. One of the most commented-on has been an investigation of the ways in which the […]
At a time when some appear intent on creating a mythological past for the Irish people, physical remembrances of our history have come under threat. Moore Street, site of the last armed confrontation of the 1916 Rising was once a vibrant street in the heart of the city where a large proportion of Dubs did their […]