News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Time to end this sham fight and build the new hospital

By Kilkenny Now 8th May 2022 0

The politicians who are trying to block the construction of the new National Maternity Hospital on the site of St Vincent’s, in south Dublin, are waging a phoney war. This battle was won more than 40 years ago and even then it was a bit of a sham fight. The loser was not the Catholic […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Tread softly, Mary Lou, when you tread on unionist dreams

By Kilkenny Now 30th April 2022 0

It is more than 30 years since Dominic Murray published Worlds Apart, a book that has stood the test of time as a revealing and insightful study of sectarianism in Northern Ireland. It concentrates on the education system and has a section devoted to attitudes at neighbouring schools in the greater Belfast area – one […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: When a glimpse of stocking was nothing shocking

By Kilkenny Now 16th April 2022 0

I was scrolling through television listings when I noticed the BBC was running some of the old St Trinian’s films. Not the 2009 version, with Colin Firth and Talulah Riley, but the originals, with Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell and George Cole . I vaguely remembered having watched them as a child, maybe a teenager, with […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Sonia and the census get the gender question right

By Kilkenny Now 2nd April 2022 0

The first personal question on your census form asks your name; the second  says ‘what is your sex’. You have a simple choice, male or female. If you had been living in Scotland when its census was conducted last month you would have found that question more complicated. There you would have been able to […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Bah mumbug! Time to ditch this Mother’s Day nonsense

By Kilkenny Now 26th March 2022 0

What is a modern Irish mammy? Or mam, mum, ma, mom, mommy, mother? Whatever you’re having yourself. She has as many roles as she has names. She might be a business woman who also looks after a family. Or a carer who also holds down a job in a factory. She might have children but […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: How a dark horse helped Charlie beat the bookie at last

By Kilkenny Now 19th March 2022 Post a comment

Work was scarce when I was growing up and a lot of men, with nothing better to do, divided their days between the bookmaker and the pub. Once a week they collected the dole – the buroo, they called it, Belfast-speak for the employment bureau. Battle-hardened wives would swoop quickly to get some family money […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Ireland and the free world is at war – and we must live with the pain 

By Kilkenny Now 12th March 2022 0

In 2001, a junior minister, Joe Jacob, talked himself out of his job with advice on how Ireland should handle a nuclear emergency. We should, he said, take iodine tablets and consult a leaflet, neither of which had been issued; we should stop drinking water from the well and should bring in the cattle from […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Why we must stop depending on Russia and China

By Kilkenny Now 5th March 2022 0

Neville Chamberlain was the British prime minister whose appeasement allowed Hitler to dismantle Czechoslovakia, opening the way for World War Two. Defending his agreement with the Nazi dictator, Chamberlain said he was keeping Britain out of “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”. The folly of his words was […]

Business News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Time we told An Taisce to mind its own business

By Kilkenny Now 19th February 2022 0

Ireland’s planning system is cumbersome and costly. Local authorities make decisions, Bord Pleanála may overrule them and the dispute can end up in court. Sometimes the verdict will be appealed to a higher court, as happened with the proposal for a cheese plant at Belview, in south Kilkenny. The process can take years , two […]

News Opinion

MICHAEL WOLSEY: Sad, funny and soulful – but it’s just not Belfast

By Kilkenny Now 12th February 2022 0

Like Kenneth Branagh, Belfast is my native city. Like Branagh, I was living there in 1969 when the Troubles began and, like Branagh, I left shortly after. Like Branagh, I was raised in the Protestant community. But my memory of the city in the late 1960s is very different from the one displayed in his […]