A line from Cicero in the 2023 film 'The Holdovers' piqued my interest over Christmas and I was reminded of the need to continuously reassert certain values in a chaotic world, taking inspiration from the great John Hume's 'single transferable speech'
Tom Backora changed my life. Not only that, he saved it. Tom was there for me during the darkest of days, showing up with nourishment for my ailing soul when I needed it most. He was a father figure - a positive male role model - and I'll miss him dearly.
A chance viewing of a festive neon art fixture in Rome burned the words, "we rise by lifting others" into my mind and I've thought about what it means ever since in a world that has strayed deeper into the corrosive darkness of cruelty and fear.
Shouldn't cavalier abuse of 'AI' tools inspire some sort of revulsion and punishment? A clash of values is playing out, where genuine intelligence, human experience, artisanship and hard work is set against hollow facsimile and outright charlatanry. What do we want to win?
According to Colin Barnes, zealous overfishing of sprat - to be sold as feed for commercial farming ventures on sea and land - has led to a steep decline in the numbers of other fish, whales, dolphins and seabirds off the south-west coast of Ireland. No sprat means no whales.
Reflecting on the folly of unduly smug armchair generals in a weirdly hawkish era of history, while hungry polar bears leave melting ice to invade abandoned Arctic villages in search of morsels.
Twenty years have now passed since my mother died, aged just 37. When the anniversaries of loved ones come, we can at least see those mists of grief gathering in the distance, albeit we don’t necessarily know how we will deal with them when they pass through us.
Finally, a profile of a man who once said he'd "rather choke on [his] own blood in NI than live on streets paved with gold in a United Ireland". Unfortunately, it does little to interrogate his corrosive influence or why he enjoys such access to power.
At a remembrance and thanksgiving ceremony at the magnificent St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh last Sunday, I experienced something that I had never felt before in my life.
Eamonn McCann and John Hume "wrecked this country", while imagined green conspiracies are afoot.
Nothing is written 