OSGUR BREATNACH

TODAY IS THE 38th anniversary of the Gárda Heavy Gang & Sallins Mail Train Robbery Case. I know this because every year, on this date, I wake up soaked in sweat at about 5am, by way of a subconscious reminder. This is the time I was taken from my cell, in 1976, and brought down into the tunnel under Dublin's Bridewell police station to meet the Gárda Heavy Gang and be tortured .

A new international campaign has been launched for an independent public inquiry into the Sallins Case Conspiracy.

Not long before journalist Veronica Guerin was shot dead in Dublin in 1996 we met ...and she confided she was working on a particular investigation of police corruption ... she and I discussed sleaze and bribery in the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s police force.

Irish barrister, Martin Giblin SC, has been fighting and exposing Garda corruption cases since 1976, to date. No Surprise, he's back in court again. The same barrister is central to the recent exposure of the Gárda telephone recording/bugging. Nothing, it seems, has changed over the years.

'...an alleged garda assault on a prisoner exposed a recording device in a stud wall..'

A campaign for an independent sworn public inquiry to expose the truth behind the injustices in the Sallins Corruption Case and the continuing cover-up.

TALL, FIT, soft spoken with a kindly mischievous glint in his eyes Shane Mac Thomáis was hard to miss in a crowd. When I first met him around 2001 I was already acquainted with his late father, Éamon, and had avidly read and followed his father’s folksy historical media contributions, such as bestseller Me Jewel and Darlin' Dublin.

I contacted God for the Breatnach Blog to get a deeper and more in-depth interview on the referendum issues......Her position could be summarised as the following...

Osgur Breatnach in conversation with Sue Leonard at the Kinsale Literary Festival Word by Water.

On the 50th anniversary of the death of Brendan Behan It is too late to talk to him about his writing. He is dead. But he was alive when I first overheard my parents discussing him. My father, Deasún, and Brendan, were fellow writers in among other publications, The Bell, perhaps the most important Irish literary and intellectual journal in the twentieth century. Both writers shared radical political and literary thoughts, always conversing in Irish, which they had both learnt recently, post school.

The killer swans lay in wait in the rushes of the Grand Canal.

Philip Casey, writer, poet and playwright, has passed. Philip knew a lot about pain, but he never raised it with me. I knew him only as friendly, witty, compassionate and diffusing a stillness that belied his gregariousness.

The fortitude of Nelson Mandela The single-mindedness of Che Guevara The wit of Oscar Wilde The voice of Richard Burton A few true sentences

The Irish Prison Service has officially admitted that over 139 prisoners had their confidential communications with solicitors bugged.

You can never have enough democracy. I am a democrat with a small 'D'. By that I mean not a US Democrat or even a Canadian Democrat as in the amusing YouTube video attached. But it is still well worth viewing. In every other sense, like republicans of the socialist tradition, I am a democrat and believe you can never have enough democracy. This leads to the inevitable question of whether we have real democracy now. Watch The Story of Mouseland and decide.

I see singer songwriter Mick Hanley is responding positively to an Irish Arts Center invitation to perform in Manhattan New York in November while battling with Rogwort in his back garden. Is he past the point of rescue?

I posted ongratulations to Professor Diarmaid Ferriter for his article ‘Cosgrave’s support of the Garda Cast a long shadow.’ (Irish Times Sat, Oct 14, 2017) emphasising the role of the impartial historian to rise above historical revisionism/denialism. But no sooner than written, the Irish Times pulled the article from its archive and settled an action by ex- Justice Minister Patrick Cooney against the paper. (We publish the article in full below.)

The voice from nowhere stipulates how I should take care of dog poo. I am early-walking the path behind the sea-breaker wall, close to Dublin's Salthill train station, accompanied only by my intimate shadow and the sound of the voice of my mother.