![]() |
|
![]() |
![]() Gail WalkerBelfast Telegraph |
To paraphrase the opening sentence of the Western novel Shane, about a charismatic hero who turns up out of the blue and transforms life for the...
Michelle O’Neill presents herself as a symbol of a changing, more tolerant and empathetic society. The 16-year-old who sat her GCSEs days after...
Amid the deserved lauding of Lord Trimble’s courage as an architect of the Good Friday Agreement, there’s been a persistent narrative about his...
The 40th anniversary of the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings in London and the 50th anniversary of Belfast’s Bloody Friday rolled round this...
With grim irony, the deluge of toxicity directed at unionists this week was a largely self-inflicted injury, aided by a few unrepresentative, stupid...
If I’d been able to summon the energy to lift my head off the pillow and reach over to the radio, I’d have fired it against the wall. Believe me,...
One week on, I’m still processing that extraordinary performance by Sir Paul McCartney at Glastonbury. An 80-year-old man on stage for almost three...
Only moments into the exceptionally moving Requiem Mass for Aideen Kennedy, Father Sean McCartney went straight to the deeply perplexing and...
Tomorrow is Father’s Day, one of those occasions which my late dad would have described as a “funny old time”, meaning it wasn’t a...
Tomorrow is Father’s Day, one of those occasions which my late dad would have described as a “funny old time”, meaning it wasn’t a...
Trawling online turns up only scant details. You will not establish the definitive death toll or how many children were among those slaughtered at...
Trawling online turns up only scant details. You will not establish the definitive death toll or how many children were among those slaughtered at...
Eleven years ago, I attended the funeral of Michaela McAreavey in St Malachy’s Church, Ballymacilroy, Co Tyrone. It was an unforgettable day, for...
Near the end of the fascinating and often elegiac BBC documentary Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen, the monarch reflects on how she must seem to us “a...
US Congressman Richard Neal arrived by plane in Ireland to investigate the protocol deadlock but he may as well have been travelling by time machine. ...
What a triumph Derry Girls has been. The sitcom signed off this week with an emotional one-hour special set against the backdrop of the Good Friday...
The eagerly anticipated BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends starts tomorrow. It might seem unlikely but this novel by a...
It may be idiosyncratic to present a “unionist” view of the Assembly election, largely because a unionist view of anything now seems to mean...
The Assembly election is only days away. For months, it has been built up as potentially a game-changer. Though both the DUP and Sinn Fein have...
What’s this Assembly election really all about? Well, take a deep breath… in a nutshell — people working together for real change now to fix the...
Among all the contemporary interviewees and archive footage in Netflix’s masterful documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, it’s a...
The latest poll says only one in three people here would vote for a united Ireland immediately. This is hard on the heels of a consensus that the...
Welcome to ‘Living with Covid’. On April 1 last year, no people at all were recorded as having died from Covid within the previous 24 hours. None...
How wonderful to hear Conor Bradford back on the Radio Ulster airwaves this week, albeit to take his formal leave of them. The energy in the studio...
With the same groans of “It can’t be that time again” as the clocks go forward tonight and we lose an hour, the first election posters are being...
With the same groans of “It can’t be that time again” as the clocks go forward tonight and we lose an hour, the first election posters are being...
The St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washington and New York this week again took place disappointingly without a unionist leader present. Gordon...
I spent much of the last year writing about Covid. Largely about how the Stormont administration had managed to lag behind every twist and turn of the...
Recently a few friends and I were recalling how as teenagers back in the Eighties we were terrified of imminent nuclear holocaust. We’d laughed at...
The untimely death of Christopher Stalford, aged just 39, is a profound tragedy that will irrevocably change the lives of his widow, Laura, and four...
Anyone looking for a symbol of how uninspired our Stormont administration has been need only cast their gaze at the silent amusements at Barry’s...
Jim Shannon’s emotional unravelling in the House of Commons as he told how his mother-in-law had died alone from Covid made for moving and...
The anonymous tweet sent to Diane Dodds MLA mocking the death of her son Andrew was abusive, vile and horrifying. What wasn’t shocking was the fact...
Despite the early promise, 2021 turned out to be another strange, disturbing and dark year. Who knows what 2022 will bring? But here are my 12 New...
Despite the early promise, 2021 turned out to be another strange, disturbing and dark year. Who knows what 2022 will bring? But here are my 12 New...
Gerry Adams’s ‘comedy’ video was surely one of the most bizarre outings in the career of the former Sinn Fein president. For an influential...
Some might think the controversy over the repainting of Biblical scripture on Portstewart’s publicly-owned sea wall is all rather eccentric, but...
Sometimes — just sometimes — the most complicated of moral dilemmas, or what seem to be, are actually very simple indeed. Such as how to mark...
Today's Executive meeting to address the medical emergency engulfing Northern Ireland produced an astonishing result. Nothing. A rare joint...
A bus hijacked and set on fire in Newtownabbey, its driver traumatised, its passengers caught up in sinister mayhem. The second such attack in...
Health Minister Robin Swann should log on and study the detailed guidance for patient care as set out on the government’s own website. The five...
Health Minister Robin Swann should log on and study the detailed guidance for patient care as set out on the government’s own website. The five...
The killing of John Patrick Cunningham was pitiful. A 27-year-old man with “the mind of a child” and anxious around men in uniforms, he feared...
If there is one lesson to be learnt from this extraordinary pandemic it’s that poor communication can be fatal. Unbelievably, it has taken a...