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You are > Home > Plain Chant
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A lie goes round the world as Enda puts on his boots!
02 February 2012
THE TRUTH is rarely well served in Irish politics and even less so in the cockpit of self-interests that is the Eurozone.
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The last thing we needed was a rogue spaceship to fall on us
25 January 2012
Last week we were told that a rogue Russian spaceship had an outside chance of falling on Ireland after its engines failed to fire and it became stuck in Earth’s orbit.
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Fine Gael didn’t win the last election – Fianna Fail lost it!
18 January 2012
I heard this reality check from a disgruntled Fine Gael insider horrified at the cack-handed manner of the coalition's approach to the retired elderly by way of an intimidating letter that raised hackles, fears and stress levels among startled recipients who had voted for rejection of similar arrogance in office from a glaringly inept Fianna Fáil administration that had sold the country into virtual servitude.
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Will Ballina bring home the bacon despite it all?
11 January 2012
On the night of January 6 and 7, 1839, when the cold front of an Atlantic depression, which had been moving towards Ireland, collided with the warm air over the West coast the hurricane that developed caused the death of almost 300 people, wrecked 42 ships at sea – in which most of the deaths occurred in trying to ride out the hurricane and one of the steeples of the Church of Ireland in Castlebar was blown down.
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The plight, flight and blight of the Irish
04 January 2012
IT rained hard on the far side of Christmas and it blew gales on the other but on the day itself the weather was so unseasonably warm and benign as to constitute an all-time record for this country evoking the Biblical encouragement of Joshua to the afflicted: “Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid; neither be thee dismayed for the Lord thy God is with thee wheresoever thou goest.”
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Santa’s shrink wrapped and half-priced Christmas
29 December 2011
THANK Heaven I have lived to see the day – weather permitting – when Mayo has become the cynosure of envious eyes from Dublin to Kerry because the acquisition of seven cycling projects, two swimming pool upgrades and two new coastguard boats are helping this county to achieve the potential of its glorious natural amenities among which Minister of State Michael Ring is proud to be numbered among the four Fine Gael TDs that rival parties are accusing of favouring this county.
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Lessons should be drawn from RTÉ case of wronged priest
21 December 2011
"The crassness of the Irish Hierarchy sacrifice of the innocents to protect the institutional reputation of the church represents hypocrisy at its most heinous."
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There’s still a long, long trail winding to land of our dream
14 December 2011
Regular readers of this column will have noticed that for the past month – and in the interests of sanity – I have refrained from over-dosing on politics, the economy, banking greed, the substitution of the coldly secular for religious grace, the failure of leadership at so many levels and in its collective wake a widening trough of near public despair.
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When rings, bracelets and hen houses fell from the skies
07 December 2011
FOURTEEN hours out of Newfoundland, with all navigational instruments out of action and fuel running low from battling with heavy squalls, the crew of the US Air Force Liberator bomber were glad to hear their bomb aimer crouched in the nose of the plane call out that he had spotted a large hole in the cloudbank through which he could see the green grass of Ireland.
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Going to shoot rabbits but he bagged mystery plane instead
30 November 2011
THERE was nothing much stirring in Ballina on that warm day in July 1945 when he decided to take out his gun and find some rabbits for target practice, since firing guns seemed to be the main pre-occupation of a world at war.
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Shouts of Up Mayo through the encircling economic gloom
23 November 2011
JAMES Laffey's door stopper of a book, The Road to 51 – The Making of Mayo Football, is not just about the growth of the GAA along well-worn tracts.
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Calling a halt to money worship and purblind politics
16 November 2011
SINCE Ireland is rarely consulted by our EU paymasters – beyond an occasional pat on the head for being such a teacher's pet when other schoolmates were smashing up the furniture that went with the transfer of the curriculum to the new Board of Governors composed largely of one armed economists – I have been looking to other alternative occupations than daily perusals of print and broadcast reports about social injustice.
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It happens when high finance remains all Greek to so many
09 November 2011
THE phrase “It’s all Greek to me” has taken on a whole new opaque density for the average slow learner taxpayer repeatedly assured from on high that fiscal complexities are best left to the financial gurus and ‘trust’ is still the coinage of probity.
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Mother Ireland continues to rear them wet !
02 November 2011
WE know it rains in Ireland. We also know that it rains more often in the West of Ireland than in most other regions in the country.
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When Porter was the power that drove threshing machines
26 October 2011
THESE days we are all invited to celebrate Arthur's Day with something approaching the fervour with which we associate Paddy's Day – that other Apostle of the spirit – with both the subject of a clever marketing employ using flippancy as a means of disguising the fact that Guinness is not always good for you.
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