Author Archives: Jimmy Burns

Good Friday Agreement remembered

A Personal Memory by Jimmy Burns   The author, who covered Northern Ireland during the 1990’s as a journalist  with the FT ,  remembers the key final stages of the peace process that led to the historic deal.   With the approach of the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday agreement, and what promises to be a make or break in terms of the latest attempt to settle stormy waters in the province with a planned visit by President Biden later this month (April), personal memories flood back of  …

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Spook Turf Wars

Review by Jimmy Burns of ‘Need to Know’ , World War 11 and the rise of American intelligence by Nicholas Reynolds (Mariner Books) Blame Ian Fleming but my generation of fellow British  public-school boys – privileged private educated friends,  some of whom went on to enter the secret world after being born in the early stages of the Cold War -developed our early perception of US intelligence through the prism of James Bond’s alliance with his CIA buddy the similarly fictitious Felix Leiter. The Texan Leiter ,as dramatised  by different …

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Johnson’s nadir

  Even for Boris Johnson, someone who for most of  his  adult life has set honesty  at a pretty  low standard, the taking of an oath must  have given him some pause for reflection. As he swore , live and streamed, on the bible to speak the truth and nothing but the truth before his l parliamentary inquisitors, one got a sense that the stage was set for a reckoning. Johnson may have made a habit as a journalist and prime minister with playing fast and loose with the facts, …

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Humanising Asylum Policy

  I am indebted to Tim Fetherston for a reminder that in this conflictive,  confrontational politics of today we need  to retain a sense of moral duty of care for the vulnerable.   Fetherston  is a volunteer medicolegal doctor from the Northeast if England  with Freedom from Torture,  a UK charity which, since its formation in 1985, has provided support for more than 50,000 victims of torture who have fled to the UK for asylum. This support ,Fetherston tells us, “takes  the form of psychological therapy, social assistance and advice, …

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Pele & Maradona: Contrasting Greatness

by Jimmy Burns Among the claims to football greatness, those of Pele and Maradona,   who died within just over  two years of each other,  will endure as a contrast in character and iconography,  defining between them the developing story of modern football. Pele’s  emerged  on the international scene as  a skinny seventeen-year-old in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. He went on to straddle the transition of football from a game to a serious business venture, breaking cultural  and racial boundaries , his true potential barely registered by the  grey …

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Messi is the greatest, so was Maradona

For fear or being  accused of being a party popper, and in deference to my many Argentine friends who ,  as I write , are having the most joyous and extended  party of their lives, let me first offer my  heart-felt ‘felicidades’. Argentina has  not only won two world cups as a democratic country, but each have  been achieved thanks by the best player of his time,  with a distinct personality and unique set of skills. No need to relegate the memory of the late Maradona to make way for …

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Maradona’s World Cup

Maradona’s World Cup Story By Jimmy Burns   With the World Cup in Qatar fast approaching this winter in the Northern hemisphere, one football legend will be missed, and notable by his absence , even  for ever  remembered,  Diego Maradona who died two years ago on the 25th of November 2020. During his tempestuous life and career, Maradona played for top clubs in South America and Europe-including Boca Juniors, FC Barcelona and most notably Napoli where he became an adored hero and adopted son.  He was the Player of the …

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How should we remember war?

How should we remember war ? As a new virtual museum tells the story of the Spanish Civil War, Jimmy Burns looks at the place of memory in a seismic conflict (Published in The Tablet www.thetablet.co,uk 29/October/2022)   Spain limped into the third decade of the 20th century  fractured “with one half of her being, for the other half  lingered with El Cid and the conquistadores” .As Jan Morris went on to also note in The Presence of  Spain,(published in 1964) she was “a mess of a country”, tortured by  …

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Lies Damn Lies:The Falklands War

If in war the first casualty is truth, then the Falklands conflict, fourty years ago, provides an interesting case study. This paper examines the extent to which a regimented society in Argentina was exploited by the military junta to provide a manipulated and distorted narrative of the Falklands War. The aim was to give the impression that the war was not only justified in sovereignty terms but had God on its side. In the process a nation rallied behind a Project which in diplomatic and military terms was doomed to …

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David Gardner Remembered

In memory of David Gardner, friend and colleague David and I were not just colleagues but enduring friends over more than five decades from when we first started at Stonyhurst College aged thirteen. Those were  formative years educationally with the Jesuits giving as a sense of human solidarity and openness to the world and the need to be active participants. He was always ahead of me intellectually and I followed his early teenage recommendation for expanding my learning. He was reading Orwell as an example of English essay writing and …

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