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Anthony McIntyre ☠  Last weekend in London, British police in a message symptomatic of Burnham draconian intent arrested 325 people at a protest rally outside the US embassy.


The rally had been organised by Defend Our Juries. 

Most of those detained were bearing placards proclaiming I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action. Yet a woman brandishing a placard I support genocide, I oppose Palestine Action was allowed to proceed without police intervention. This prompted a wry observation that “You can’t make this up . . . you can openly cheer for mass murder, but you can’t protest against it.” 

Fortunately, for now, on this turf where Burnham’s writ does not run we can still protest against mass murder and voice our support for Palestine Action without fear of arrest. The elderly Jewish human rights lawyer, 94 year old Margaret Owens was not so lucky. She was one of those arrested.

Echoing the earlier seniment, Rita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, described what is happening under Burnham who remains on course to complete what Keir Starmer began.

The Kafkaesque UK laws adopted under the Starmer (government) to appease Israel are such that you’ll get arrested for terrorism if you hold a sign saying, ‘I support Palestine Action.’ But if you hold a sign saying ‘I support genocide, I oppose Palestine Action,’ then you’ll be fine.” 

Zack Polanski, leader of the UK Green Party served it up on a plate in his scathing criticism of the Burnham policy:

This is truly dystopian . . . Israel killed eight people, including a child, in Gaza this weekend as they continue their genocide . . . After a weekend of arresting pensioners for protesting against this horror, Labour has (put) Israel far above serving our local communities.

Welcome to Burnham’s Britain which is tough on grannies but easy on Genocide.

The protests that took place in London were staged against a background of ongoing genocide in both Gaza and The West Bank. In respect of the latter Israeli policy has been spelt out by the Tel Aviv human rights body B'Ttselem in The Elimination Report in which the body drew on 2000 testimonies from Palestinians taken since October 2023 complemented by three decades of monitoring the behaviour of Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. B'Ttselem said:

The report looks at the current reality not as a collection of isolated incidents or specific harms, but as part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination that works to dismantle the conditions for continued Palestinian existence in the West Bank, while deepening Jewish control and supremacy in an irreversible manner. An examination of the current reality in the West Bank reveals that the project of elimination is now being implemented more openly, directly and violently than before, and increasingly relies on cooperation between official state authorities and settler militias operating in the West Bank with state backing and support.

Since the start of 2023 almost 50,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes or land and 1,333 killed by settlers or soldiers. While the October 7 attack simply cannot be justified by any group purporting to hold to the universal application of human rights, the figures show that more people have been killed in the West Bank since 2023 than died on October 7. 

On top of this a UN Commission of Inquiry reported in the middle of October that Israeli authorities have committed the crime against humanity of persecution against Palestinian children, where in the West Bank “the harm inflicted on children is not incidental or collateral to the broader violence affecting civilian population, but forms part of a pattern of intentional violence.” According to Human Rights Watch:

Their findings recognize an important dimension that has not been given enough attention: children in the West Bank have been deliberately targeted—not just because of their nationality, race or ethnicity but also due to their age—in attacks causing serious bodily and mental harm.

This is entirely consistent with the claim made by Simon Harris shortly after the onset of the Israeli genocide that Israel was waging war on children. 

Margaret Owen and others are being arrested for standing in opposition to what has been clearly identified by a UN Commission of Inquiry and B'Tselem. It is what we stand against week in week out. Like Margaret Owen we stand here weekly, not meekly or weakly. Today we stand also with Margaret Owen and her colleagues who constantly fear arrest. In doing so we stand resolutely against Burnham who despite replacing him continues to stand with Starmer. 
 
⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Tough On Grannies 🪶 Easy On Genocide

Geordie Morrow ðŸ–Œ with a painting from his collection of art work.


Belfast from a window in the Winchester ward - oil on panel - 24”x24”

⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Ommadawn

FOwen O'Shea ðŸ”–will see his book on Austin Stack launched in Dublin next week. 


Unchanged And Unchangeable: Austin Stack And The Irish Revolution


Venue: Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street, Dublin

Date: 12-November-2026

Time: 1900

Guest Speaker: David McCullough



Book Launch 📚 Owen O'Shea

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin ðŸ”–has just finished the a recently published book on Sinn Fein.

Inside Sinn Féin, But None the Wiser


In a lifetime of reading, only two books have seriously tempted me to give up halfway through. The first was Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The second was Siobhán Fenton's account of her time working for Sinn Féin. In both cases, I suspect my expectations had rather more to do with my disappointment than the books themselves.

I bought Fenton's book when it was first released but deliberately put off reading it. I had a holiday coming up and wanted to take my time with it, rather than rush through something I had been looking forward to.

When I finally settled into my seat for a three-hour flight, I opened it with genuine interest. Having spent twenty years in the Republican Movement, I wanted to know whether Sinn Féin had changed much since I left. Had the party changed internally, or had it simply learned to present itself differently? A book written by someone who had worked inside its communications operation seemed a good place to look for answers.

What followed was a long account of the everyday business of political communications. Fenton goes into unremarkable detail about her time working for Sinn Féin. We learn about Mary Lou McDonald's clothes and lipstick, the décor of buildings, press cycles, polling and the arrangements surrounding political announcements. At one point, she even tells us what the choir was wearing at the lighting of the Dáil Christmas tree.

Much of the book is taken up with policy announcements on housing, childcare and other issues, along with detailed explanations of how Sinn Féin tested public opinion and managed the media reaction. We are taken through the mechanics of polling, market testing and press management, often at considerable length.

Fenton also spends a surprising amount of time explaining why she went to work for Sinn Féin. I can understand why a journalist might feel the need to explain that decision. But having done so once, there seems little reason to keep returning to it. I had no particular interest in judging her career choices. I wanted to know about Sinn Féin.

There are also occasions when Fenton repeats Sinn Féin's account of its own history without questioning it. This is particularly noticeable in how the party presents its relationship with the IRA, the peace process and its move into constitutional politics, as though these were all part of a carefully worked-out strategy rather than a series of decisions shaped by changing political circumstances. Sinn Féin has spent years putting its own interpretation on that history. I had hoped Fenton might test some of those claims rather than take them at face value.

Working inside an organisation does not necessarily mean understanding it. Sometimes it simply means becoming familiar with how it wants to be understood. A journalist writing about Sinn Féin should be prepared to question that.

It is not until chapters fourteen and fifteen that the book begins to tell us something about the Sinn Féin I had hoped to read about.

With a general election approaching, the party was struggling to hold together two different groups of voters. There were its traditional working-class supporters, many of whom had stayed loyal through difficult years, and a newer, more middle-class electorate attracted by the prospect of political change.

Sinn Féin was trying to ride two horses, and neither appeared particularly happy with the direction of travel.

At the same time, the party leadership seemed to be losing touch with its grassroots. Mary Lou McDonald appeared increasingly removed from the problems developing around her, while those running the party were busy with polling, public relations and the prospect of entering government.

Here, finally, was something worth reading.

How had a party that once prided itself on knowing its supporters become so distant from them? Had the pursuit of middle-class votes changed Sinn Féin itself? Or had the leadership simply become so used to telling people what they wanted to hear that it had stopped listening to what they were saying?

For years, Sinn Féin had presented itself as the alternative to the political establishment. It was the party that would do things differently. Yet the closer it appeared to get to government, the harder it became for some voters to see what made it different from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.

The party that promised to change the system was now working hard to show that it could manage the system.

These were the questions I wanted Fenton to unpack. Unfortunately, much of what she tells us about the internal disagreements comes through unnamed sources and vague references. We are given glimpses of what was happening but little opportunity to understand why.

And just as the book begins to get interesting, we are back to press releases, polling and the daily work of political communications.

Perhaps I expected too much. Fenton worked in political communications, and it is reasonable that she should write about what she knows. There is value in understanding how a modern political party manages its public image. But the public image is not the organisation.

In recounting the circumstances of her departure from the party, Fenton appears to have discovered something many of us learned long ago. Sinn Féin has a habit of eating its own. You are useful for as long as you are useful, and when that usefulness ends, you can quickly find yourself on the outside looking in. In this respect, I have some sympathy for her. Whatever my criticisms of the book, I recognise something familiar in her experience. Indeed, it is perhaps the one insight the book offers that suggests the movement has changed very little in the twenty years since I left.

I spent twenty years in the Republican Movement before leaving. I wanted to know whether Sinn Féin had changed since I left. Was it much the same organisation, only with better suits and a more professional press office?

Having finally finished the book, which took rather more determination than I had expected, I still don't know.

Siobhán Fenton, 2026. Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors. ISBN-13:978-1844887095. Publisher - Sandycove.

Ourselves Alone

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Forty Five

 

A Morning Thought @ 3317

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 6-November-2026.


The Irish state media, RTE, reported that the prominent academic Tom Felle had faked his academic credentials. He has no doctorate and yet was employed by Galway University as a senior lecturer and was lauded as an expert on Fake News. You really couldn’t make it up. Well, Felle could and he seems to be quite the expert on faking it.

We have yet another scandal about low standards in high academic places. Lots of people have been exposed either faking their qualifications or plagiarising. Manaj Kumar faked his PhD from Cambridge and was exposed in 2015.[1] More recently, the chair of the King’s Foundation, Dame Ann Limb, admitted that she never completed her PhD at Liverpool, which was listed on her CV as having been awarded in 1978, nor does she have an M.A. from the Institute of Linguists, because it does not award M.A.’s. She proffered the defence that she had received honorary doctorates from other institutions and that was really why she used the title Dr.[2] Of course honorary doctorates are part of the official academic fake awards. Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and other entertainers have honorary doctorates.[3] Felle is now another one to fake his academic record and get away with it. At the time of writing he was still listed as a senior lecturer on Galway University’s staff list[4] and elsewhere on the site as an Associate Professor, though this may change.

Felle is a chancer and a well-placed and respected one, at that. He has made submissions to the Irish government, worked with the UN and ironically, he has published articles on disinformation. He has been part of the Russians and Chinese are coming rubbish that is so prevalent in the media. He, like many academics marches in step with the EU position on the war in Ukraine and in celebrating an agreement between his university and Ukraine stated that “Democracy relies on informed citizens and a resilient media system.”[5] Just not too informed, it would seem. Felle is as transparent as Ukraine’s accounting practices for EU largesse. He has however, done some good work on actual fake news spread by the Right on migration. That work has now been undermined. It is best to leave the chancer stew in it and not lend any credence to him as his work can now only undermine causes. Though I expect the usual suspects to defend him, as they are part of the system that allows grifters like Felle to climb up the greasy pole, stepping on hard working people who deserve a step up but get passed over for conmen like him.

The other thing that stands out is the lengths RTE had to go to in order to check that he didn’t have a PhD from City St George’s. They filed a Freedom of Information request. The university refused to confirm or deny he had a PhD at all, citing spurious data protection concerns. Felle however, had claimed his PhD was by prior publication which means he presented a shorter thesis along with previous journal articles etc. It is still a PhD, though not the most common route. So RTE asked the university how many such prior publication PhDs had been awarded in the period Felle claimed to have obtained his. Bizarrely, they claimed they didn’t have that information on record. RTE appealed the decision and was eventually told that no such PhDs had been awarded for the period concerned. This is bizarre as the university library has, as is common, online catalogues which include theses by students. I checked them and there are some journal articles by Felle in them, including a submission to the Irish government, but no PhD.

That the university would go to such lengths to protect a chancer is remarkable and tells us a lot about academia. In the debate around Jason Arday, some on the Left who were ensconced in the upper echelons of academia defended Cambridge and Liverpool John Moore’s and demanded we take the universities at their word. That is a foolish exercise.

Political issues now arise around Felle’s work on disinformation and no doubt some on the Right will raise it whenever the Left and NGOs cite his work on racist fake news. In that he has done a great disservice to migrants. It would be best if he kept quiet, but he probably won’t. If your ego is that big to lie about a PhD, you will probably tough it out. The Left should have no truck with this chancer, he will only undermine anti-racist work. His Russians are coming nonsense should also be ignored, though I suspect there are those on the Left who will continue to cite him and if not him, the likes of him.

What now for the university? Its courses and initiatives on journalism and disinformation are tainted, to say the least. A man who faked it till he made it was a key player in it all. It deserves to be ignored as well. I am not sure where Felle stands legally. He got a job that is funded by the public purse by falsifying the record. He should be charged, the state should be reimbursed and he should not be let anywhere near the education sector ever again. And hard questions need to be asked of academia.

References

[1] BBC (01/12/2015) Cardiff college head revealed as PhD fake. 

[2] BBC (21/12/2025) King’s Foundation chair and nominee peer admits misleading doctorate claim. Amy Walker. 

[3] People (18/09/2024) 18 Celebrities Who Have Received Honorary Doctorate Degrees (Including Taylor Swift, Céline Dion and More!). Skyler Caruso and James Mercadante. 

[4] See 

[5] University of Galway (02/12/2025) University of Galway partners with Government of Ukraine to strengthen democracy and media education. 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Faking It At University 🪶 Galway Fake News Expert Goes The Extra Mile

Enda Craig ⬟ In older combined sewer systems, stormwater and domestic, commercial, and industrial wastewater are carried through the same pipes. 

Under normal conditions, wastewater treatment plants can process these flows provided the combined volume remains within the plant's treatment capacity.

Many treatment plants connected to combined sewer systems are equipped with retention basins designed to temporarily store excess rainfall. Once the rain subsides, the stored water is gradually released for treatment.

However, during prolonged or intense rainfall events, or periods of rapid snowmelt, these systems can quickly become overwhelmed. When both treatment plant capacity and retention basin storage are exceeded, overflow structures discharge a mixture of untreated sewage and stormwater directly into nearby rivers, estuaries, lakes, or coastal waters.

The environmental and public health consequences can be severe. Sewage-contaminated waters may contain harmful bacteria, viruses, and other pollutants, affecting water quality, marine ecosystems, bathing waters, and beach sand. Such contamination can render recreational waters unsafe for public use.

In a recent video, a respected Professor of Microbiology expressed serious concerns that beaches affected by sewage contamination may not always be tested before being declared safe for continued public use. If accurate, this raises significant questions about public health protection and whether beach users could unknowingly be exposed to contaminated water and sand.

Modern sewer infrastructure avoids many of these problems by separating wastewater and stormwater into different pipe networks. Wastewater from homes and industries is directed to treatment plants, while surface water runoff is conveyed separately to rivers, lakes, or the sea. By preventing large volumes of rainfall from entering treatment systems, separate sewer networks significantly reduce the risk of sewage overflows during extreme weather events.

Key Point: Combined sewer overflows are not treatment failures caused by negligence; they are a predictable consequence of ageing infrastructure that lacks the capacity to handle increasingly intense rainfall events. The result is that untreated sewage can be discharged directly into the environment precisely when water quality is already under pressure.

Lady's Bay Waste Water Treatment Plant in Buncrana is a perfect example of this fundamental underlying design fault which has destroyed the town's most important asset.

This important issue should be front and centre for discussion of any proposal to locate a WWTP inside the environs of Lough Foyle when Irish Water and Donegal Co Cl return to Moville in the near future.

⏩ Enda Craig is a Donegal resident and community activist.

How Outdated Sewer Systems Cope With Heavy Rainfall

Christopher Owens ðŸ”–“All entertainment is political. Artists are like mirrors to the world, to society. We have to name things … it’s, like, such an important, intrinsic part of our job.”


This quote (from loser She-Hulk actor Tatiana Maslany) sums up the sheer contempt that a lot of people working in creative arts today have towards their respective mediums, seeing them as platforms for espousing their politics without any thought about creating something everlasting, beautiful or compelling.

It’s all about relevancy these days and the notion of things being "relevant/irrelevant" (boke) fucks me off. To simply dismiss something because it’s not in fashion/doesn’t line up with the current school of thought/isn’t commercially viable is not just the act of a dunderhead, it’s a confession that those doing the dismissal cannot process anything for themselves and need explicit approval from others to enjoy art.

This attitude has been evident for the last 25 years but it’s only since the mid-2010's where politics really began to equal relevancy. Be it climate change, Trump, Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, Gaza, if artists weren’t in line with the prevailing narrative (or worse, didn’t comment on politics at all) then they were in trouble.

It’s not sustainable, and this timely book from Alexandra Wilson offers us common sense on the topic.

Describing the current landscape, she paints a bleak picture:

We read of curators castigating the very art works they have been charged with looking after for historic sins. We hear of arts festivals being boycotted, either for platforming speakers/ artists of whom other speakers/artists disapprove of, or for taking money from sponsors whose investments are deemed to have failed a strict purity test...artistic spaces have become political battlegrounds, with theatres, concert halls and galleries now the go-to forum for protests about everything from distant war to climate change. What is going on?

Underpinning a now widespread insistence that the arts must constantly attend to politics is the notion that ‘everything is political’. This is an idea with its roots in academic theory, which has entered the mainstream conversation over the last decade. It is voiced not only by outspoken people with a drum to bang on social media or by journalists touting for clicks but also, in some cases, by the very people who run our arts institutions, as the arts find themselves at a strange intersection between managerial bureaucracy and progressive activism. There is no coordinated campaign, yet it is a way of thinking that has taken grip extremely widely in a short space of time.

Throughout the book, Wilson tackles issues related to a self-loathing arts sector that cannot argue for its existence, condescending approaches to the ordinary person, classic works being used as a springboard for the latest fashionable cause and a defence of art for art’s sake.

It’s a worthy topic and Wilson does a fine job in demonstrating how officials perpetuate the idea that art is an elitist hobby in order to try and make it more appealing to the masses by dumbing it down. It’s a genuinely maddening cycle of self-perpetuation. Crucially, she never makes a claim that all art must be devoted to the rehabilitation of the soul but that there should be room for both.

Although not the definitive take on the subject, it’s still a passionate polemic that should be used as a conversation starter when it comes to these issues.

Alexandra Wilson, 2026, Culture Vultures: When Activism Meets the Arts. Polity Books. ISBN: 978-1509571956

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Culture Vultures 📚 When Activism Meets The Arts

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Forty Six

 

Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 23

 

A Morning Thought @ 3316

Jim Duffy ✍ I used to work as a tourist guide. 


We had a ghost - a monk with a badly cut tonsure. My colleague and I never saw him, but we repeatedly had the first tourist arriving in (and there is only one way in, past us) coming back and asking "who is the old monk with the cut on his head at the end of the slype?"
 
The first two times my colleague and I panicked, thinking that we had accidentally locked someone in the previous night, and rushed down there to find there was nobody there - and there is only one way in and out.

It always happened on Tuesday mornings around 10am. I took down details of the tourists in case it was some hoax being perpetrated, with a hotel telling tourists to claim they saw a ghost. The tourists were unrelated, staying in different locations, and often were in the country at different times. They all described him identically.
 
My work colleague and I never saw him but we noticed that on Tuesday morning the place would be unearthly cold. It was in the middle of a heat wave but we would have to put on our jackets and gloves. Then the cold would suddenly disappear.
 
The place was cold anyway. We had to wear winter clothes working there, then change to summer clothes to go outside to get something to eat. But this man, about five foot three, with a tonsure and a cut on it, was continually seen by tourists, always in the one spot where a blocked up door was. He'd be looking at the posters explaining the history of the building.

I was fascinated that tourists from the US, Canada, the UK, all across Europe and Asia all saw the man. It was always the first tourist on Tuesday morning who saw him. They all described the same man, and all thought he was a visitor. As I said there was only one entrance. We were sitting there. We knew for a fact the tourist who saw him was the first person in.
 
We presumed he was a monk who lived and died there and probably was buried there. The two of us there weren't unnerved by him. We never saw him ourselves and presumed he was just someone who lived there and kept coming back to visit a place. The spot he was seen standing in was a blocked up corridors. Monks had been buried a few feet away. The old abbey was demolished centuries ago but the chapter house survived in the middle of industrial buildings and was used as a grain silo. A hole had been cut in the roof to pour in the grain. The hole has since been concreted over.

The chapter house features in Irish history. It was the place where the Lord Deputy and privy council met, and into which Silken Thomas stormed to challenge the Lord Deputy when he wrongly thought his father, Gearóig Óg FitzGerald had been executed by Henry VIII. My work colleague and I used to say "can we not have the ghost of Silken Thomas or a Lord Deputy, rather than just an unknown small monk with a badly cut tonsure?"

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Ghostly

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