To Mega Therion (and beyond!)

Where to begin? If I go right back to my very early teens I remember developing a great interest and fascination with Irish and Egyptian mythology. While the latter was more in the context of archaeological interest, the former held a deeper attraction for me. I was reading The Táin about the same time a

NEW STRAY BULLETS PODCAST EPISODE

In Part II of ‘In Bloody Protest For A Glorious Thing’ I continue my thoughts on militant Republicanism in the context of ‘Heroic-Sacrifice’ and a mythic past to which the Patriot Dead added their names for ‘Ireland’s freedom’.

Ghost Days

So, yesterday was a bit of a ‘ghost day’ for me. Haunted. A past incident I was involved in unfolded around me. Encircling. Containing. Actuality dissolving into the early 1990s. The battleship grey of a Tangi landrover dully defying the sharp blue of the morning sky. Dark blast marks radiating out like teeth from where

BOOK REVIEW

The Sun is Open By Gail McConnell Published by Penned in the Margins In 1984 the author’s father was murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army outside his home. The author, who was three years old at the time, was witness to her father’s brutal slaying. The author kept a ‘Dad Box’: cuttings and fragments

ALL LIFE IS NOISE

mind going backwards to the IED – the one by the path not the car not the firing-point not the one that took a soldier’s face so many – a mind made of sepia voices wrapped in newsprint washed away yesterdays red streams through barren field-dressings drown my mind. Politics is just noise in my

The Apotheosis of Assassins

There’s no greater act of liberation than dying a death so grand to free one’s native land.

Heart of the Sun

Have you seen light stolen from the day veined by wire and shaped into a heart of clay by hands unhallowed couched in prayer to brutal gods they bring their heart into the mass who by its flare are broken into bread and pour their wine onto the street yearning for an end of days

The Long and Wounding Road

This hell we once knew haunts us still. The RUC and PTSD continued.

In Paradisum

In Paradisum

Paramilitary funerals in Northern Ireland.

Martyrs who forever lurk in the cold earth of their victims.

Renaming Old Wounds

Northern Ireland: contested name, contested soil, contested blood. The land Irish Republicanism sought to reduce to ash and bone. The land Unionism sought to stamp its dominance upon the throat of the Fenian and the usurper. Arise, the infant dead, the garroted, the bomb-blasted, the cripple, the widow, the orphan. Arise, arise into the lights