Profile for GavBelfast
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GavBelfast has commented 235 times (29 in the last month).
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Books
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Sunday Supplement
Tweet It being Sunday, we’ve all got time to consider and ponder things at greater length than during the working week, yes? If it’s good enough for the Sunday papers, it’s good enough for this guest blogger. So here’s the review section… Actually, it’s my introduction to a book published last year, Goin’ Down Slow: [...] read our review » -
Stay out of Libya: counterinsurgency doesn’t work
Tweet A moment of some significance in journalism perhaps, as the New York Times reviews the current talked about book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Bing West. The author is no bleeding heart but a former assistant Defense Secretary from the Reagan era who stomped his way round the [...] read our review »
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Eamon Nancarrow’s misadventures in Rock…
Tweet It’s the quiet ones you have to watch, they say. When I last saw Eamonn Namcarrow, back in the mid 1980s he was a congenial, good-natured and highly sociable young lad. The next time was 26 years later, in Lavery’s Gin Palace in Bradbury Place. He’d just brought out his first book, Holywood Star [...] read our review »
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Comment on Micheál Martin “there is a grave danger that policing in the North will be compromised because of this activity”
on 17 May 2013 at 10:41 pm
Northern Nationalists, as extreme as, and more extreme than, Sinn Fein, also demonstrate how out-of-kilter they are from their compatriots in the Republic of Ireland these days with this sometimes slightly constitutional behaviour.
Still, like the other end of the horse (or is it a cow?) it does well to please the camp-followers every once in a while ….
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Comment on Micheál Martin “there is a grave danger that policing in the North will be compromised because of this activity”
on 17 May 2013 at 9:32 pm
I can understand Unionists feeling that a Fianna Fail leader should ‘butt-out’ of Northern Ireland matters.
But Northern nationalists? “Your” would-be Taoiseach?
The irony ….
The sham-fight Martin identifies (on a regular basis now) does indeed suit both ends of the co-enjoined pantomime-horse very nicely, thank you very much, and to hell with their fodder and the rest of us (useful and pliant idiots, too).
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Comment on OFMdFM panic move was “like a funding application where the Secretary of State had cracked the whip”
on 16 May 2013 at 9:25 pm
I’m not at home at the moment and the situation seems even more pathetic, and most of the whole damn lot of them seem even more like a bunch of amateurish, and often unpleasant incompetents, when close to it all.
Not so much a dearth of talent, as a death.
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Comment on OFMdFM panic move was “like a funding application where the Secretary of State had cracked the whip”
on 16 May 2013 at 2:25 pm
“Yours,
A Statesman”.
I think not.
Just imagine, for one moment, how much more awful it would be if he was an actual Prime Minister, rather than a merely one-half of an office ‘leading’ a do-nothing bucket-shop for a political slum.
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Comment on UTV Insight: Collusion and some of its innocent victims…
on 11 May 2013 at 10:08 pm
I’m not the one hurling incendiary insults and hysterical generalisations left, right and centre – and then coming-overall all precious, coy and sensitive when called-on it or someone returns the serve!
Bloomin’ pathetic is what they are, nuff said.
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Comment on Seize the opportunities opened up by the Good Relations strategy. Don’t write it off
on 11 May 2013 at 9:06 pm
Cutting through the flannel and flim-flam – from Thursday and in stuff written about it since – the abiding emotion remains one of disgust at the sheer audacity of that pair who have, variously, whipped-up people and then seek adulation for gimmickry and window-dressing.
Of course, apart from their own holier-than-thou attitude to criticism, from Robinson in particular, political pygmies in their own parties, and cheerleaders from a range of interested parties, such as the endless community groups and ghetto-dependent tourism-types.
Well-meaning and occasionally useful idiots, within and without a media that is generally far, far too pliant towards this do-little pair, also play their part in this pantomime.
Not falling for ANY of it, here or anywhere else.
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Comment on UTV Insight: Collusion and some of its innocent victims…
on 11 May 2013 at 9:05 pm
Isn’t it so often the way that – the more extreme and entrenched, the more precious.
Online, as in life.
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Comment on UTV Insight: Collusion and some of its innocent victims…
on 9 May 2013 at 8:36 pm
“I think it says a lot when your national hero is a misogynist cold warrior who gets his kicks killing Johnny Foreigner with a smile on his face, whilst sporting his Union Fleg underpants.”
Deary, deary me ….
(Sorry, BlueJazz, I know that (and the rest) was directed to you, but my head-shaking at such paucity meant I just had to say something.)
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Comment on UTV Insight: Collusion and some of its innocent victims…
on 8 May 2013 at 9:47 pm
I’d be interested to know if Irish-(nationalist)Americans, or whatever-generation-Irish (nationalists) in America, at least those who contribute to this site, devote as much, or indeed any, time to causes and calls related to any suggestions of less than whiter-than-white actions by state agencies there, as opposed to on this ‘side of the Pond’?
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Comment on Irish Justice Minister: “a tribute to how far we have come as a society”
on 8 May 2013 at 8:58 am
Oh that extremists, mis-informed or pig-ignorant, plastic or otherwise, would show even an ounce of the good sense and conciliatory attitude that the Government of the Irish State has done with this act.
Well done, Mr Shatter, to the Government and indeed the Dail as a whole for dealing with this issue in a mature and, eventually, sympathetic and just manner, while some of those affected are still here to appreciate and benefit from it.
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