Discussion drags on in the North about Gerry Adams’s purpose in telling Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk that he trampolines naked in the back garden of one of his houses with mischievous mongrel Saoirse bouncing happily alongside. Personally, I wouldn’t feel at ease bobbing up and down bollock-naked in such proximity to canine teeth.

The consensus is that the image Adams wants to arise when his name is mentioned is not of a man with a wolfish snarl as he dismisses tales from former comrades of nutting squads, Jean McConville, Maria Cahill etc., but of a genial eccentric meaning no harm.
I wouldn’t know how secluded his homes are in Louth, Belfast and Donegal, but surely somebody would have gotten an inkling of a senior citizen with a foam-flecked beard cavorting on canvas with a cur. In Donegal, it would have been the talk of the town before his giblets had stopped jiggling.
The image is unlikely to damage Adams’s chances in Louth. Sir Malcolm Rifkind had to resign as MP after being rumbled for attempted double-jobbing. They do things differently over there, the devious English bastards.

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What’s this about Muslim kids being “radicalised”? Who radicalised George Bush or Tony Blair?
Why dismiss the possibility that some who trek to join Islamic State have seen Western armies bomb and burn Muslims by the hundred thousand to the loud applause of every mainstream politician and commentator and hear persistent questions posed as to why “we” don’t bomb and burn them in bigger numbers so as to secure peace and democracy?
The reason is that facing the most obvious reason for “radicalisation” would raise the thought that withdrawing Western troops from the Middle East might prove the best means of staunching the flow of recruits to an outfit as cruel as Christians down the ages.
IS inflicts stomach-churning cruelty on all varieties of heretic misfortunate enough to fall into their hands. For justification, they appeal to Allah the Most Merciful. Any who find this alien to the thinking of civilised minds should scan the Book of Joshua. Or, US commentator Gary Leupp suggests, acquaint themselves with the massacre in May 1637 of the Pequot people by the Pilgrims (yes, the ones in the Quaker hats who had fled persecution in England in hopes of finding tolerance) who torched a Native American village on the Mystic River in what is now Massachusetts. Around 700 people, men, women, children, babies, were roasted to death, no doubt howling in agony and despair and clinging to one another until the flesh fell from their bones. Captain John Mason, who elsewhere wrote tenderly of the Pilgrims’ Christian message of peace, recorded that the bonfire had been an act of God, who had “laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven. Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling (the river) with dead Bodies.”
The best contribution we can make to extirpating the evil of IS is to demand an end to the bombing and the withdrawal of all outside troops from the region.

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I am sometimes met with honest bewilderment when I argue that the Good Friday Agreement and its various appendices are sectarian at their heart and incapable of delivering a society undivided by religion.
But reaction to the threatened closure of St. Mary’s Teacher Training College on the Falls Road makes my point. In February, Stormont Minister for Employment and Learning, Stephen Farry of Alliance, announced an intention to merge St. Mary’s with the State, effectively Protestant, Stranmillis College. There were around 350 student teachers in the North. Why did we need two colleges, especially when unemployment among newly-qualified teachers is running at least 30 percent?
And wouldn’t it be better for teachers of different religions to learn together?
It was once taken for granted by everyone who fancied him/herself as a progressive class of person that integrated education was a desirable end, if, admittedly, difficult to attain. Groups of parents here and there lobbied and won funding for an integrated school in their area.
Now, teachers and students pour out from St. Mary’s with placards accusing Farry of attacking Catholicism. The “ethos” of the college was important to the Falls, they maintained. The merger would deny “the community” its rights. There was a more muted response from Stranmillis.
At Stormont, only Alliance showed any enthusiasm for the merger. The plan was dropped. The Catholic bishops were chuffed to bits.
Control of the schools is vital for maintenance of the hold of the Church over the people. Everywhere, it leaves parents with no option but to involve agents of the Church in the upbringing of their children. It is the most important mechanism for underpinning the power of the Church in society. And you cannot keep control of the classroom if you haven’t first trained the teacher to follow Church discipline.
So the pro-life crowd have the run of the schools while common-sense supporters of choice are shut out, and parents who themselves are pro-choice are unable to insist on respect for diversity without risking their child having a rough ride.
Supporters of separate schools argued, with some justification, that Farry was contradicting the spirit of the Agreement – which guarantees equality and rights not to citizens but to communities. Separate but equal development. Now where did we hear that before?