Dean Godson: More needs to be done to challenge the easy ride that republican revisionism has been given newsletter.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsletter.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
My last column before Christmas is a plum pudding from which I will pluck out some sweet plums and a few bitter almonds.
First plum: the Cork Holly Bough, which carries a fine picture of a relieved and happy Micheál Martin with his family, probably taken after he was finally reunited with them after his long Covid separation.
It also carries my modest piece on the politics of Niall Tóibín, who in New York once reflected that if Jewish comedians could make jokes about the Holocaust, surely we could get over the Famine?
Another fine plum is my annual letter from Tadhg O Leary of Mayfield, Cork, in flying column form this year. He begins as usual with ironic congratulations: I must commend you for your consistence in sullying the names of our Freedom fighters. And he goes on to excoriate the British Empire for its colonial crimes.
Claire Byrne s incisive interview with Mary Lou McDonald did our democratic State some service last week.
Byrne s steady probing flushed out the crucial fact that the leader of Sinn Féin would rather suffer political damage than condemn an IRA atrocity.
This seems to confirm that in the crunch Sinn Féin is directed by the IRA, which the security forces say is still active, still armed.
The IRA s project is no secret: to unite Ireland no matter what mayhem that project causes.
A major part of that project is to mobilise modern Irish history in the service of Sinn Féin.