Sam Thompson writes and occasionally lectures on history. A former RUC officer, he wrote his first novel, Nights in Armour, under a nom de plume, which I reviewed back in 2017. An updated version of the novel was published by Mercier Press in 2019. Sam now describes...

A report from a Basque comrade on protests around the continued imprisonment, after thirty years, of three political prisoners. The north of the Basque Country, or the so called ‘French part’, came to a standstill yesterday as a series of demonstrations took place to...

Ciarán Quinn, Sinn Féin’s Representative for North America, writes about the issue of consent to constitutional change and how unionists are trying to create a precedent for blocking change and turning its meaning on its head - A couple of weeks ago I had an exchange...

My review of Professor Brendan Kelly's book, In Search of Madness – A Psychiatrist’s Travels Through the History of Mental Illness, was published in the Weekend Section of last Saturday's Irish Examiner. Here it is: ‘At the age of 20, Helen presented to the hospital...

My friend Glenn Bradley thought he would refresh with a little Father's Day kayaking before the arrival of the family. But then things took a sinister turn... My wife Jo and I awoke early both enthused with a good night’s sleep. The sea air at our holiday home gifts...

My review of Dolly Parton's debut novel (in collaboration with James Patterson) was published in the Weekend Supplement of the Irish Examiner, 7 May. Here it is: A vagabond waif, a young woman with a gun in her bag, walks into a Nashville dive, The Cats Paw Saloon,...

Among all the protagonists to the recent conflict in the North there is one side, above all others, which urgently needs to ‘draw a line through the past’, as if that were ever possible. It’s not that it seriously believes that the stroke of a pen or a piece of...