531 days ago
Thanks to the sponsorship of Sure Valley & Pires Investments (PIRI) we are expanding the number and quality of speakers and are able to offer up more fun and games at Sharestock this year - as you can see HERE. In this episode I chat to Brian Kinane and Barry Downes of Sure Valley but mostly to Jack Morrow of Retinize, a firm based in Belfast so which can do no wrong.. Enjoy.
772 days ago
As a progressive sort of chap, the second team I support in International soccer is, after Northern Ireland, our friends across the border in the Republic. But the Irish girls team don’t seem to like folks like me very much.
1298 days ago
The tweet below shows some scousers honouring the 40th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, terming him “The People’s Own MP.” I suggest to you that these Fenian scum, whose souls will surely burn in hell, are rewriting history and also do not speak for the vast majority of Liverpuddlians, most of whom will be horrified by this.
2340 days ago
I am the last person to berate the fine folks from my family’s ancestral homelands of the Kingdom of Ulster or indeed the modern day province. SUFTUM is what I say as I wake up every morning to retweet - with my own comments - @onthisdayPira. But some communities are just perhaps just too tightly knit, too cosy. I refer to the accounting arrangements of First Derivatives (FDP).
2414 days ago
A few weeks ago, after a nine week trial, two Ulster and Ireland rugby players, Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding, were found not guilty of rape. At once the hashtag #Ibelieveher started trending and hundreds of protesters gathered in Belfast and other cities across the island of Ireland. You will note that those tweeting and protesting were not in the Court room or on off-site visits with the Jury but, based only on what had been reported in the media, they asserted that the jury, who had been there, had got it wrong.
2449 days ago
It was 2009 and the Ireland team of Brian O'Driscoll had just won the grand slam. For my father it was the second triumph for the Old Country in his lifetime. The first was in 1948 when Jackie Kyle from Belfast lead the men in green to the first ever clean sweep in what, was then, the five nations.
2483 days ago
As a lifelong supporter of Ulster and Irish Rugby I was this weekend celebrating a famous and thrilling win in Paris. My father said he could almost not bear to watch the final minutes but he managed it and was euphoric.Our brave lads were led out by skipper Rory Best of Ulster but if you check out social media you will see that in the run up there was a most hateful campaign against Best. His "crime?"
2826 days ago
I have mentioned my Godfather Vicious in another context elsewhere, that is to say his tendency to fall for lesbians, something that has somehow passed on to me. During our time at Butterwell farm Byfield when I was a young boy, Vicious was in a "between lesbian phase", that is to say his wife who much later became a lesbian had left him as a fresult of his own naughtiness, but he was yet to hook up with the mother of his daughter who then left him for another woman.
3148 days ago
The lastest warning on why we must all either have no sex or safe sex tells us that if you sleep with ten people then, if you count back their partners and their partners former partners, etc etc it is the same as if you had slept with the entire population of Belfast. I contemplate this matter as I examine the twitter connections of someone who, I belatedly notice, has followed me.
The idea of sleeping with the whole of Belfast is profoundly worrying. It is not that you would not have some fun as you worked your way through 286,000 people. But I would have thought that images of Gerry Adams stripping of and striding across a bedroom towards you would be enough to put anyone off sex for life. Perhaps that is the hidden message from the public health campaigners.
As you are about to engage in a casual unprotected sexual encounter suddenly you will, going forward, find yourself thinking of St Gerry standing there with blood on his hands and wearing just his Y-fronts. "Gerry is that a kalashnikov or
