Léargas

  Micheál MacDonncha with Howth rifle Moore St Exhibition for Belfast For the last two weeks the alternative plan for the development of Moore Street prepared by the Moore Street Preservation Trust has been on exhibition in Cork. Regular readers will know that I have a particular grá for the 1916 Moore Street Battlefield site and the efforts to save this hugely important historic area from developers who plan to destroy much of it. The exhibition opened in the Nano Nagle Centre in Cork on 12 March and runs to 26 March. Belfast will then have its opportunity to see it when it is officially launched here on 30 March at Arás Ó Chonnaighle. It will then be put on public display in the Kennedy Centre on Friday 1 April and Saturday 2 April. At the same time the Moore Street Preservation Trust will sell raffle tickets to raise much needed funding for the Moore Street campaign. The prize is one of the iconic Howth rifles smuggled into Ireland in 1914 and which were later used in the Easter Ris

  Irish Neutrality is not for sale The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to dominate the news agenda. Lines of tanks and armoured vehicles inexorably move toward Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Images of hospitals and family homes bombed and destroyed; of refugees, particularly children, the elderly and disabled, forcibly fleeing has led to a massive outpouring of solidarity. People want to help. Some provide food and clothing for shipping to Ukraine. Others offer to provide shelter for those refugees who make it to our shores. All very worthwhile and commendable. However, some in the political and media establishment in the South have cynically seized on the current crisis to argue for an end to Irish neutrality. Some media commentators have worked themselves up into a militaristic frenzy. They want the Irish government to sign up to a European Army and NATO.  Many of these are the same people who support the continued use of Shannon by US war planes.  Leo Varadkar spoke recently

  Palestinians deserve our support also There are two photographs in this week’s column. One is of a school. To tally destroyed. Levelled. Classrooms reduced to rubble. The work of students scattered across the ground. The other is of a hospital. Mickey and Minnie Mouse and other favourite Disney characters look down over floors strewn with the flotsam of war. Life saving equipment destroyed. Walls and floors shattered by shrapnel. Both buildings were the target of rockets indiscriminately fired at civilian targets. Had these images been taken in Ukraine and resulted from attacks by Russian war planes or rockets the international media would have plastered them over their front pages. Politicians in the EU, Britain, the USA, and elsewhere, including Irish government Ministers, would have been falling over each other to express their outrage and condemnation. What the Russians are doing in Ukraine is totally and absolutely wrong and deserves being highlighted, exposed and opposed.

Russia get out of Ukraine   The big story of the moment is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Like many of you I have been watching the round the clock news reports emerging from what is now a war zone. The television images and photographs are distressing. Burning buildings, the skeletal shell of others already destroyed. Russian tanks and armed soldiers. And terrified citizens and families, many with young children, desperate to escape. There have been images also of ordinary citizens determined to resist and fight the invader. Of people hunkered down in the street making petrol bombs.  The film footage of an elderly woman confronting a Russian soldier reminded me of many similar instances in our own experience, not least the ‘march of mothers’, many pushing prams, who swept aside British soldiers’ as they brought food to the besieged community in the Falls who were under British military curfew in July 1970. These images are a shocking visual record of the violent abuse by one state o