Why I'm tired of writing to the 'Irish Times'.

Those of you who read the Irish Times would probably recognize my name from the letters page. Over the past decade or so I've had about 20 or so letters published, which puts me in the same league as Tony Allwright, another frequent scribe.

But over time certain patterns have become clear:

• The IT doesn't have much of a sense of humor. In particular humor directed at causes they hold dear or which violates the norms of political correctness doesn't get far.
  

• They appear to have pigeonholed me as some sort of neo-conservative right-wing loony who is a allowed a look-in whenever things are a bit quiet. I am openly very right wing by Irish standards (or rather the standards of the Dublin 4 elite who run the media) but that doesn't make me a neo-conservative.
  

• In order to get a letter published it has to be short. All good writing should have a strong signal-to-noise ratio but in practice the space restrictions constrain my ability to advance an argument to a couple of sentences.

• They rarely print my responses to people's responses to my letters (got that?).

• They have a built in bias in favor of such dubious causes as the so-called Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who get a slightly different version of the same letter published every second week.

As a result I've decided to devote my energies to this blog for a while.

Since I have a rich vein of unpublished letters to mine as source material expect a series of articles on subjects which are no longer current.