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You are > Home > Beyond the Pale
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Brian never got to realise his full potential
15 June 2011
Aprofound public sense of a loss of a heroic life cut short by cancer on June 10 last, before achieving fully his human potential, has accompanied the tragic death of Brian Lenihan, at 52, that calls to mind the spontaneous sorrow which followed the killing of Michael Collins, aged 31, at Beal na mBlath on August 22, 1922.
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Archbishop woos New York Times readers
08 June 2011
BEING a journalist constricts the deadline-driven scribbler to an unorthodox lifestyle that defies the routines and rules determining most people’s ordered lives.
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When things get sticky, reach for the Sellotape
02 June 2011
AFTER the euphoric escapism of the Elizabethan and Barackan fiestas has come the inevitable return to economic reality with a political clanger from a senior Government minister suggesting that Ireland may need to get further loans from the European Union and IMF next year. Take a bow, Leo Varadakar.
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Garret’s secret meeting with Pope Paul VI
25 May 2011
IN the fulsome tributes paid to Dr Garret FitzGerald, focus has been placed on how he negotiated his major achievement of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 after overcoming British Premier Margaret Thatcher’s dismissal of the three models of governance advocated by nationalists at the New Ireland Forum as being, in her words: “Out. Out. Out.”
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Royal visit should have been a private occasion
18 May 2011
THE “start of a new era”, is how Taoiseach Enda Kenny has described this week’s visit to Ireland of Queen Elizabeth, which has been hailed as “extraordinary” by President Mary McAleese.
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Good relations with Edinburgh will come in handy
11 May 2011
AS ENDA Kenny eases himself into the office of Taoiseach, the man from Islandeady would be well advised to ponder on the enormity of political developments which transpired last week in the neighbouring island of Britain, quaintly called the United Kingdom, which geographically includes Northern Ireland.
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The saints go marching in, but is it right?
04 May 2011
THE soothing sound of Louis Armstrong’s sentimental song, What a Wonderful World, provided the mood music for many folk over two welcomingly warm Bank Holiday weekends in which a Roman beatification of Pope John Paul II, a British royal wedding, well-attended Easter church services and the annual 1916 commemoration ceremony provided plentiful pageantry to appease abiding anxieties about economic woes.
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Angry voters make the ‘good Europeans’ pay
20 April 2011
FINLAND, the land of composer Jan Sibelius, is the latest country to register a discordant note highlighting how the EU symphony orchestra is playing out of tune and is departing from the original score-sheet’s grand design for ever harmonious bonding of the peoples of Europe.
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Enda should invite Rory to a round in Mayo
13 April 2011
IN our celebrity-cosseted age when the pulp book trade and fledgling alternative media industries churn out flimsy autobiographies of stars barely passed their kindergarten years and when ‘kiss and tell’ revelations shock us at the flawed lives of revered icons, I find it remarkably refreshing at how a 21-year-old Belfast man has reacted to his own spectacular failure watched on television by millions.
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Informers can now be servants of democracy
06 April 2011
A MOTHER’S grief on Mother’s Day was doubly heartbreaking when a brave Mrs Nuala Kerr made a dignified and impassioned plea that the murder of her beloved son Ronan by criminal cretins calling themselves "dissident republicans" should not deter Catholics from joining the PSNI, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
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It is time for Enda to take a moral stand
30 March 2011
“GOING on a journey” is a phrase that has come into vogue with Irish political and church leaders of late. As in Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s political journey to address the country’s debt crisis.
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It shouldn’t be Them versus Us in Europe
23 March 2011
AFTER a vernal week of spring victories in Washington when President Barack Obama rolled out the White House red carpet on St Patrick’s Day for Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and Ireland trounced England on Saturday on the green rugby field of the Aviva Stadium, we face into a week of Them Versus Us in Europe.
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Can the man from Davitt County free Ireland?
16 March 2011
NOW that Enda Kenny is the undisputed Taoiseach of Ireland and has embarked on his “democratic revolution”, historians and journalists will be ploughing through Dail reports and fading newspaper cuttings for a more rounded appreciation of the “long and arduous journey” in politics of the “man from the county of Davitt”.
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Cocktail Government facing State’s darkest hours
09 March 2011
THE Fine Gael Five Point Plan and the Labour Party’s pre-election programme have been distilled into a cocktail Government for National Recovery which was clinched in Dublin on Sunday with the Herbert Park Handshake by the slim-line Enda Kenny and the burly Eamon Gilmore.
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Friday deadline for Enda and Eamon
03 March 2011
PRELIMINARY negotiations to put precision on a Programme for Government to deliver “a democratic revolution” to liberate the Irish people from punitive bondage to the ECB-IMF have opened between Enda, the Conciliator and Eamon, the Dogmatist.
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