IN his recent study of Donald Trump's use of language, Roderick Hart, a scholar of political rhetoric, describes him as less a toddler and more an adolescent: "Moody, impulsive, terribly needy for love, resentful of authority, full of fears he cannot admit, and emotionally raw.

The news announced this week by the Minister for Communities that the housing executive is to undergo the biggest shake-up in its 50-year history, is one of the most positive developments in the north in decades.

The Sunday Times reported last weekend from Croydon University Hospital in south London, which has set up a quarantined ‘hospital within a hospital’, physically sealed off from all emergency admissions.

IF you want to work in the journalistic trade, it is essential to have a cheeky side to your nature.

The terms of trade in politics in Ireland have changed, but in the north people haven’t caught on.

A friend, now sadly no longer with us, once gifted me a tie he had bought on a trip to New York.

In case any readers don’t know this, to concentrate on news newspapers like to have columns, days before they appear, locked into their systems.

From time immemorial human beings have been interested in the world around them.

The news about the murders in Nice was spine-chilling.

The increasing competition between Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin in claiming to offer the best route to a united Ireland is the latest chapter in nationalism’s tradition of romanticising the past, fantasising about the future and ignoring the present.

The past fortnight’s Covid school closures were designated as an extended half term holiday, swerving most of the political and practical questions involved.

I was at a panel event last year and was asked by representatives from both the SDLP and Sinn Féin why mainstream unionism tended to 'boycott' such events.

In the early 1930s my great aunt Mary, a teenager at the time, left her family home on the shores of Lough Neagh in Tyrone to make a new life for herself in America.

I see we're now at the blaming sick people for getting sick stage of lockdown.

To function better, Stormont needs more ministers - perhaps as many as 35 more.

“Any bars (craic)?” I ask my Derry-born mother every time I ring home.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Ambition in politics is to some minds an addiction, though arguably the decider for decent people to involve themselves in a trying and often dirty game.

I’m not planning on dying soon, but there has been a feverish discussion at home about the fate of a pair of Staffordshire china dogs that have pride of place on the mantlepiece.

My octogenarian father has a vivid memory, as a child, of my grandfather rushing into the house to ‘switch on Athlone’ (as he insisted on calling Radio Eireann) to hear an important message from the taoiseach, only to be bitterly disappointed when he realised that the north did not feature prominently in De Valera’s pronouncement.