Jude Collins worked for thirty years as a lecturer at the Ulster University/Ulster Polytechnic. Before that, he was a high school English teacher in Derry, Dublin, Edmonton and Winnipeg (Canada).
He is the author of eight books, including Booing the Bishop and other stories and Martin McGuinness: The man I knew. He has been a weekly columnist for The Irish News, Daily Ireland and currently writes for The Andersonstown News.
He has broadcast on TV and radio for the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Press TV and RTÉ. For the past thirteen years he has written a daily column on his blogsite www.judecollins.com
THE US has been good to the Irish people. From the huddled masses arriving on coffin ships in the nineteenth century, to support of the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, to giant companies like Apple and Google helping the South of Ireland to accumulate unprecedented wealth, the US has been a massive support to Ireland.
CHURCHILL wasn’t the first to have the thought, but it’s his phrasing of it that’s best known: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...”
THERE are things we don’t like to think about, much less talk about. Maybe that’s what happened to a lot of commentators during the recent US Presidential election. They really really didn’t want Donald Trump to win, and they had this weird notion that if you didn’t think or talk about a Trump victory, it wouldn’t happen. All the commentators and pollsters and wise guys kept telling us that this election was so tight, if you listened you’d hear it creak.
I'VE long had a suspicion that politics is a dull game. Having to cope with constituents who want you to fix something over which you have no control. All those committees, all those yawn-inducing Assembly/Dáil sessions where representatives posture and preen and congratulate themselves and their leader
IT'S amazing what you’ll find on YouTube. Among the guys urging you to buy a cloth that’ll make paintwork scratches on your car vanish, or what foods to eat if you want to live to be 135, there is a considerable number of items that delight and inform.
HOW do you suppose Micheál Martin and Simon Harris are feeling right now? Are they optimistic? Quietly pleased? Giddy with delight?
WE live in a globalised world, yet we can all feel helpless in the face of events. War in Ukraine, slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon: the blood and dust smears our screens night after night. It’s got to the point where many turn their eyes from the horror and switch channels or switch off. The big brutal world out there is not of our making, appals us, and so we withdraw our attention.
DO you remember when the parish priest would patrol country roads in search of immorality? Or when the parish would have a week-long mission and the visiting missioner would often thunder damnation for sins which his terrified congregation had never heard of, let alone indulged in?
BEING a politician means you face a number of dangers similar to those faced by a high-wire artist.
THERE may be unfeeling people who have thought or even whispered “Third time lucky, lads!” in the wake of the second attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I would not be of their number. The former US President may be an obnoxious being, but he’s also a human being, and it’s important to respect and even love the most primitive of God’s creations.
THERE'S always a villain. We must ever be on red alert in case something evil comes to seize our children and turn them into zombies or monsters.
NELL McCafferty in 1987 spoke the truth and paid the price.
TAKE a walk or drive round the centre of Belfast and you’ll find the place transformed. The Waterfront Hall and the Titanic building and the costly hotels and apartments soar skyward. In the downtown Ulster University there are 650,000 bricks, 22,000 square metres of glass and 606 kilometres of data cables that’d stretch between Belfast and Derry six times over. Oh, and they expect the buildings to last 300 years.
THURSDAY of last week marked the 26th anniversary of the bomb in Omagh. My home town, as it happens: Ten yards from the epicentre of the explosion I got my fortnightly hair cut, ten yards the other way I had my first date.
LAST week, two horrific events happened within twenty-four hours of each other.