It’s all a lottery

You know the way it is: you are in the shop, you only want to buy a newspaper, you’re already late for whatever it is you need to do next. You get to the check-out; just one middle-aged man in front of you. But, oh dear! The man is asking the sales assistant to check [...]

Re-naming hallowed ground?

Sorry, it’s one of those moments when I have to say something about events at Newcastle United FC. As some readers may know, the club has not been having a happy time with its current owner, Mike Ashley, and fans have been in revolt ever since he forced Kevin Keegan to quite as manager. But [...]

An academic bonus?

Right now the word ‘bonus’ – when applied to special payments that supplement salary – has become a dirty word, suggesting greed and abuse by corporate managers at times when their organisations are failing and people are losing their jobs. So it may seem counter-intuitive for higher education institutions to experiment with bonus payments at [...]

Higher education, and shifting the geopolitical balance of power

How countries and regions respond to dramatic economic circumstances can have significant longer term effects on the global balance of power. Two historical developments, for example, shaped the world’s political make-up for the later 20th century: the financial fall-0ut from the First World War, when US dollars moved in to bankroll some of the key [...]

Professor Murphy’s Law

Yesterday wasn’t the best of days – lots of annoying things, lots of things going wrong. In the middle of it all a colleague, in commenting on one of the things that had happened, said it really was ‘Murphy’s Law’. Ah, I said, so what is Murphy’s Law. ‘Easy’, he replied: ‘Anything that can go [...]

Turkish delight?

As I have mentioned in this blog perviously, I was not hugely impressed with some of the arguments used, on both sides, during the recent referendum campaign in Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty. But perhaps the most outrageous slogan used was found on one anti-Lisbon poster: ‘Hello Lisbon, Hello Turkey, No Way’. This was outrageous [...]

Be-gowned

I was recently invited to attend an inaugural lecture by an academic who is an old friend of mine, and who had just been appointed to a professorship in his university (not DCU). His lecture was a tour de force on aspects of law and society, and the whole thing was most enjoyable and stimulating. [...]

Wrapping up history

From time to time in this blog (for example in this post) I have pondered on the ability of our generation to comprehend and make use of history. I suppose a final comment on this might be taken from an item in the newspaper, the Scotsman. A sample of young British people were asked to [...]

Over 50 and still going strong

I have to be honest and tell you that I passed my half-century a few years ago. I’d like to think that I still have youthful good looks and could pass for a much younger man, but that got punctured the other day when a small boy passing by on a bicycle with his father [...]

Keeping the time

As I write this, it is 1.20 am on Sunday, October 25. If I keep writing for exactly another hour (which I won’t), I’ll finish at, well, at 1.20 am. And that is, of course, because tonight the clocks change in these islands, and we will be moving from British Summer Time (BST – do [...]