Eoghan Harris

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Fearless Mary Lindsay has better right to be a feminist icon than Markievicz

Mary Lindsay, who was shot by the IRA 100 years ago last month, has as much right, and in my view even more right, to be an Irish feminist icon than Constance Markievicz.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Nobody knows how we would vote if it really meant a united Ireland

Things are getting worse in Northern Ireland, and most of my readers have been taught to blame the wrong side and let Sinn Féin off the hook.

Sinn Féin can only carry on these campaigns with the help of ‘woke’ liberals who are still not awake to the threat that this party poses to Irish democracy

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Gutless Government caves to Twitter campaign targeting press freedom

Last Tuesday, Micheál Martin, Leo Varadkar and Eamon Ryan cravenly condemned as "misogynistic" Jim Cogan's cartoon attached to my column in the Sunday Independent. There was no media pressure on them to do so. RTÉ did not cover the story, possibly because it would mean breaking their ban on me.

'McDonald is vainly trying to make a big blaze from a few pages of a leaked document'

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Sinn Féin frenzy rooted in fear of a return to any kind of normality

First, I want to show why the frenzy behind Sinn Féin's witch-hunt of Leo Varadkar is fake from top to bottom.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Commission on media is a joke if Rusbridger isn't forced to resign

Last Saturday was my 78th birthday, which makes me one of the longest-running political columnists in Ireland.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Simon Coveney is too nice to the EU and too narky to unionists

Simon Coveney's enthusiasm for the European Union does us no favours either on Covid or calming tensions in Northern Ireland.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Machnamh also needed on the murder of Bridget Noble

As an admirer of President Higgins it saddens me to take him to task for some of his recent reflections on British imperialism and Ireland.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Ireland's Future sounds a shade too much like Ireland's past

Éamon de Valera, with excruciating precision, as far back as 1933 set out the position of the Irish government for ending partition: first make the Republic a warm house for Northern Protestants.

COMPLIANT: Carmela (Edie Falco) and Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in a scene from ‘The Sopranos’

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Eoghan Harris Opinion FF's Carmela Soprano wing: gullible lambs to the slaughter

Last week, just under half the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party told The Irish Times they would consider Sinn Féin as a coalition partner after the next general election.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion How cruel Covid caught the whole world asleep at the wheel

Last week I lost sleep reading an advance copy of a new book on how Covid came to hold the whole world in its cruel grip.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion RTÉ blames the church and State but overlooks sins of the fathers

Voltaire said the greatest joy in life is speaking your mind. I agree.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Families were first to fail their daughters - that's the truth

The Commission on Mother and Baby Homes prophetically warned about its report: "The conclusions it reaches may not always accord with the prevailing narrative."

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Trump followers are toxic tribal nationalists - sound familiar?

How can our media mandarins, who bang on about Trump, miss the similarity between the scenes at Capitol Hill and Sinn Féin triumphalism after the general election?

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Don't heed the hypocrites - this push for Irish unity will end in tears

Last Wednesday, the Taoiseach told us that to cope with Covid we had to go into a tunnel of self-restraint but that the prospect of a vaccine promised light at the end.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Brit-bashing, Brexit and the centenaries feed SF's vote

Robert Gellately, a historian, has recently proven that from 1933 onwards, most Germans knew about euthanasia and the evil evolution towards what ended as the Holocaust.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion RTÉ's vivid telling of Christy Ring's story gave us man, ball and blood, too

My last column before Christmas is a plum pudding from which I will pluck out some sweet plums and a few bitter almonds.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion De Valera did not take orders from the old IRA, Mary Lou

Claire Byrne's incisive interview with Mary Lou McDonald did our democratic State some service last week.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion 'The Hunger' was the perfect foil to RTÉ's stream of sour nationalism

For years I have been like a voice crying in the wilderness warning that Sinn Féin's myth of a justified armed struggle in Northern Ireland was corrupting our youth.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Brave President shows there is no monopoly on past memory

A monopoly on national memory by any party is a first step to fascism in any country, including our own.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Brit-bashing is brutalising us and sowing dragon's teeth

Last week, I looked up my grandfather Pat Harris's application for a military pension in records recently released - but any pride I felt has long since departed, leaving only a sense of waste and foreboding.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Séamus Woulfe was a bit wrong - and then he was badly wronged

Last Monday, Chief Justice Frank Clarke released letters he exchanged with Mr Justice Séamus Woulfe in which he claimed the latter's stubborn refusal to resign was causing "irreparable damage" to the Supreme Court.

Gabriel Byrne's powerful memoir tells of Ghosts of his life with dark humour

Gabriel Byrne's Walking With Ghosts, a far cry from the usual ghost-written, humble-bragging of great actors, is destined to be a classic. Slow to judge others, he does not spare himself for what he sees as his failure to connect with those he loved most.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Varadkar lacks loyalty to any cause other than his own ambition

Leo Varadkar has one character trait in common with Donald Trump - a narcissistic neediness for constant attention that marks him as a permanent political adolescent.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Misery media fails to give due credit to the Taoiseach

Taoiseach Micheál Martin must drive his advisers mad. Unlike Leo Varadkar or Donald Trump, he never bigs up success stories such as the effect of Level 3 Plus on Covid or his visionary Shared Island project. Last Friday, Tony Holohan and RTÉ cheerleaders seemed to imply Level 5 was responsible for the improved Covid situation. Not so.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion The tragic, heroic and hidden later life of Muriel MacSwiney

Last week RTÉ showed a rounded film on the life and death of Terence MacSwiney. But it was not 74 Days.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Paschal Donohoe's brilliant Budget puts the political skids under Sinn Féin

Last Sunday, Jon Williams, managing director RTÉ News, tweeted: "Not for first time, Eoghan Harris wrong. One day's decline in #Covid19 not a cause to cheer or despair. About trend. Not RTÉ's job to do either."

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Eoghan Harris Opinion RTÉ is feeding Covid panic by failing to give good news

Last week, RTÉ showed a selfish lack of responsibility in scaremongering the public about Covid-19, while giving grief to a Government that deserved praise for its courage in keeping the country at work.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Politicians must stand up to the Trump-style populism of Sinn Féin

Last week most of the good stuff was on Newstalk, starting with my post-mortem on the US presidential debate and finishing with Charlie Flanagan's 'country solicitor' dissection of the film Unquiet Graves.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion 'Unquiet Graves' told unbalanced SF narrative of Northern Ireland

Suicide can take two forms, personal and political. Let me briefly begin with the personal - briefly, because I'll be forced back to it in the future.

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Eoghan Harris Opinion Micheál Martin doing a difficult job in the face of media carping

Last Friday, with just one clearly delivered broadcast, the Taoiseach disproved a famous dictum of Dr Johnson's - that once the media has started using you badly it will go on doing so, although Johnson used the word 'world' instead of the word 'media'.