International – Page 26 – For the fainthearted . . .

There are no aliens in Area 51

Next week, two festivals take place in Lincoln County in southern Nevada. The gatherings are close to Area 51, the military base where it is alleged there are clandestine government activities and where alien technology is claimed to exist. There is a belief that if enough people are gathered they will be able to force an entry to the base and uncover the supposed secrets about extra-terrestrial life.

The most famous story of an encounter with supposed extra-terrestrial life was some seventy years ago at Roswell in New Mexico. The …

Meat factories and bullfighting

News that the meat factories in Ireland are closed prompted thoughts about the cattle that would spend a while longer grazing in fields, or chewing silage in sheds. The factories always seem an ignominious end to the lives of very fine animals, animals that are slaughtered before reaching the age of thirty months.

It always seems odd that those who happily buy joints of beef in the supermarket would recoil at the idea of bullfighting; it is a touch hypocritical, and I would count myself among the hypocrites.

To appreciate …

Mugabe’s achievement

Robert Mugabe was an arrogant, violent, corrupt tyrant. If there are to be eulogies, they should be for those brave enough to challenge the regime of the vile former president.

Robert Mugabe’s achievement was to reduce his people to penury, reduce them to a state where they depended upon the efforts of brave individuals for their very survival. Among the brave was an Irish Anglican priest who had endured arrest and imprisonment and who refused to be intimidated by the thugs employed by Mugabe.

On one occasion, news from Zimbabwe …

Still forgetting those who fought the Japanese

Dr Mayne would weigh each word carefully. A reflective and undemonstrative man, who was unafraid to sit in silence; a quizzical look from him was sufficient to convey the suggestion that he might not agree with something that had been said.

A Dubliner who had been born during the First World War, he would recount with passion and anger stories of the poverty he encountered in the city during his days as a young doctor. When the Second World War came, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps to serve …

Burping again

Living in Ireland during the years after the financial crisis, the finance minister would explain in sombre tones that everyone must face hardship together, that the situation was one in which everyone shared. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t. The years of austerity were an opportunity for rich people to become even richer. Investors who had gambled on the bond market and had lost were bailed out by taxes from working people. Cash rich speculators snapped up houses at the bottom of the market. Vulture funds moved in to buy …

Transcendence in a rugby song

It is twelve years ago this evening that I first saw Aviron Bayonnais play rugby. It had been a matter of chance that I had discovered that, a few miles from our holiday destination, a club of whom I had not previously heard were playing Ireland’s international team as part of Ireland’s preparation for the 2007 World Cup.

It was a one-sided, bad-tempered match, but it was a special occasion. Seeing the national team play in the sky blue of Bayonne was an unusual sight, but the abiding memory of …