‘A Twisted Root’

Being expelled from St Dominic’s Grammar in 1959 over an innocent adolescent ‘carrying-on’ with some boys that summer in the Donegal Gaeltacht, undoubtedly had a profound effect on 16-year-old Patricia Craig from St James’, off the Falls Road. Her ‘co-accused’, so to...

William Crawley Interview

Was interviewed by William Crawley last weekend on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence about my new novel Rudi – In The Shadow of Knulp, and how and when I became an atheist, though my main character Rudi is a man who relies on and ‘talks’ to God! Link here (might take...

James Nolan – A Hero

Today, for some reason, I am remembering an old friend whose death I learnt about three years after it occurred, not that I would have been able anyway to have attended his funeral, seeing that I was in jail. James Nolan is now dead twenty years. I first referred to...

Death of Thatcher

Wrote a feature on the death of Margaret Thatcher which was published in today’s ‘Irish Examiner’. WHEN Mark Thatcher went missing in the Sahara while taking part in an international motor race in Jan 1982, his ashen-faced mother, upset and...

Armalites to Ballot Boxes

Fifteen years ago I covered for The Guardian and the Irish Examiner the negotiations which led to the signing on Good Friday of the Belfast Agreement. This is the feature I wrote (though slightly amended in The Guardian). Letitia Fitzpatrick from Ulster Television...