Ulster People’s Forum plans denial of service attack on PSNI and Parades Commission
![ulsters people forum [sic] leaflet](http://sluggerotoole.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ulsters-people-forum-leaflet-e1369348731511-160x61.jpg)
Tweet A News Letter online article explains that the Ulster People’s Forum is taking a leaf out of the Anonymous movement’s hacktivism playbook and are planning to flood the PSNI and subsequently the Parades Commission with spurious 11/1 forms. The article quotes Ulster People’s Forum chair John Wilson: The groups have decided to ask all [...] more »
Exploit Building a United Community to call the Executive to account, not to let them off the hook
Tweet Statement by the First and deputy First Minister “As our first move in implementing our new strategy “Together: building a United Community “ we are delivering a political bombshell. We solemnly declare that, following the precedent set by the former IRA which made stable power sharing possible, we intend as soon as possible to [...] more »
AG tells Allister his bill is NOT in breach of the ECHR…
Tweet Now this Letter to Mr Jim Allister MLA dtd 22 May 2013 from the Attorney General for Northern Ireland has just been released to Slugger, and it contains some interesting information. It relates to a number of talking points and concerns raised about the competence of the bill itself and specific concerns that it could be [...] more »
Bad news for Sweden as the social model slowly unravels…
Tweet One of the big challenges for all the Scandinavian countries (or at least those without oil reserves to fall back on) has been how to cope with waves of immigration. It’s particularly challenging for what has been remarkable homogenous societies like Sweden. Now it seems a politically unwatched pot is boiling over. Really, not [...] more »
IPSOS/MORI poll on Good Friday Agreement: Scepticism on Stormont’s ‘progress’ on sectarianism
Tweet Some interesting polling figures on Nolan last night regarding the long term effects of the Good Friday Agreement. Stand out difference is that whilst 78% of nationalists would still vote Yes, 41% of unionists would. There’s no way of really measuring that against the original poll, but Wesley Johnston estimates that 60% unionists voted [...] more »
End now the old pretence that we want to deal with the past
Tweet Another conference, another raking over old ground? Perhaps – but the DPP Barra McGrory made an interesting speech at the well-cast transitional justice conference in Belfast. “I think society has got to make a choice. Either it decides now to go down the route, the very difficult route, of determining that we are going [...] more »
Zero sum game over parades continues between OFMdFM parties…
Tweet Here’s a good one, the DUP Minister at Social Development has commissioned a report (original here, courtesy of Morpheus below) that says that parades bring in £55 million a year [there's a surprise - ed]. Except that the former Lord Mayor of Belfast says what it does not take account of is: …the mass [...] more »
Why any near term coalition between FF and SF is unlikely…
Tweet World By Storm has come to the following conclusion... …it is very very unlikely that while the FF party has a heartbeat, so to speak, that it will enter into a unity government with FG. Indeed the very most that might occur would be a sort of reverse ‘Tallaght strategy’. And as demonstrated by [...] more »
Lisburn City Council funds Unionist Forum meeting using Good Relations money
Tweet Lisburn City Council has used ratepayers money to pay for a meeting of the Unionist Forum in the Lagan Valley Island centre, cynically using the Council’s Good Relations programme as cover to enable them to finance an organisation established with the specific objectives of maximising the unionist vote, devising a joint PUL parades and [...] more »
Shatter gets away with it, but at what price?
Tweet Martyn Turner sometimes has a way of grabbing hold of what’s really going on in Irish politics and turning it inside out… As does Miriam Lord… Shatter stood his ground. No idea how the commissioner came by the information. He never looked for it, in the same way he never seeks information on any [...] more »
How well does the Catholic church understand its own teaching on abortion?
Tweet This is well worth noting before it passes over us, on the question of abortion in the south. James P Mackey is visiting professor at the school of religions and theology at Trinity College. And he’s been looking back at some of his old Catholic textbooks from Maynooth: The Roman Catholic hierarchy has formally [...] more »
Sinn Féin: Hyde Park bomb charges “vindictive, unnecessary and unhelpful”
Tweet Reports that John Anthony Downey, 61, from County Donegal, has been charged with the murder of four members of the Royal Household Cavalry in the 1982 Provisional IRA bombing in Hyde Park, London – he was arrested on Sunday at Gatwick Airport - has prompted a statement from Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly, MLA and member of the Northern Ireland [...] more »
Eamonn McCann: “People sometimes say these traditions have gone on forever. No they have not!”
Tweet I wish I had the time to transcribe this input from Eamonn McCann and taped by our own Mr Ulster… The import is that political identity is immutable and gives the politics of 1960′s Derry in which Labour candidate took as much as 40% of the vote… more »
GFA Referendum +15: Remembering ‘the People’ and Renewing Fundamentals
Tweet By Colin Harvey Dates matter on this island. None more than 22nd May 1998. Our shared and collective act of self-determination pointed to a constitutional future where we now rely only on each other. A future where persuasion counts; and people matter more than flags and territory. Readers of Slugger will need no reminding [...] more »
“culture wars and shared futures make very uneasy bedfellows”
Tweet This final post in this series about last week’s PSA/Fellowship of Messines workshop – Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process? – looks at the fourth session of the day which asked about the place of the PUL community in a shared future. Once again, the opening remarks by the [...] more »
“the current system is inefficient and we need to examine the case for reform of teacher education provision”
Tweet The BBC reports on the latest attempt by the Northern Ireland Employment and Learning Minister, the Alliance Party’s Stephen Farry, to reform the teacher training system here. It follows the publication of a report on the first stage of the Study of the Teacher Education Infrastructure in Northern Ireland. From the ministerial press release “The [...] more »
Ann Travers: “If had joined the IRA or a loyalist paramilitary and killed someone, I would be being listened to…”
Tweet Ann Travers talks to Wendy Austin earlier on Talkback on the SDLP’s petition of concern that will finally kill the Civil Service (Special Advisers) Bill. I’ll try and get a better quality recording as and when it becomes available, since for a number of reasons, I think this is an important interview. I’m going [...] more »
Gove calls for a split with Wales and NI on GCSE and A Level reform…
Tweet Here’s one to put on the long term forecast. Michael Gove was over last week (not that our Education Minister was very forthcoming on what they actually talked about)… and now he has announced there is such a gap between his reforms in GCSE and the way it is done in Wales and Northern [...] more »
The PUL Community and the Peace Process: An Audit
Tweet The third session of the all day PSA/Fellowship of Messines workshop – Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process? – looked at the peace process through the eyes of two loyalist leaders and an academic. Strong views on the Social Investment Fund, how paramilitary actions gave unionists confidence in the [...] more »
Azerbaijan Presidential Inquiry over Eurovision Vote
Tweet Denmark may have won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, due to last year’s winner, held in Malmö, Sweden, but Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev is reported to have ordered an inquiry into why his country, apparently, failed to provide any points to their neighbour, Russia. Russia gave maximum points, 12, to the Azerbaijan entry. From [...] more »
Taoiseach could do with answering some of the questions he once aimed at Michael McDowell?
Tweet Funniest moment of the weekend was when Sean O’Rourke took the sugar off Willie O’Dea’s wee bun when he mentioned Michael McDowell’s behaviour (blogged by George for Slugger at the time) over his intervention under remarkably similar circumstances to Alan Shatter’s stroke against Mick Wallace on last Thursday’s PrimeTime (12 minutes in)… Though, as [...] more »
“Republicans should remember that the third colour in the Irish flag is Orange…”
Tweet Last Thursday’s The View gave most of the programme over to the vexed issue of parading. It includes a number of noteworthy points. Neil Jarmin points out that the Parades Commission has missed an opportunity offered it by Paddy Ashdown’s Strategic Review of Parading to give it a more robust set of processes (that [...] more »
After the political victory of the GFA is Northern Ireland slipping back into another ‘big sleep’?
Tweet Men it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) Speaking of Fionola, her essay in an excellent collection from the British Council, gets a mention [...] more »
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Books
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At the current rate of progress, gender equality of MLAs at Stormont will only take another 65 years
Tweet Bronagh Hinds’ chapter of Everyday Life After the Irish Conflict: The Impact of Devolution and Cross-Border Cooperation [reviewed yesterday] examines women’s political participation points to limited progress in addressing the gender balance of political institutions. The proportion of councillors who are female rose to 24 per cent in 2011 from 14 per cent in [...] read our review »
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The Creative Class and Northern Ireland
Tweet As part of NICVA’s series of masterclasses from its Centre for Economic Empowerment project, there was a morning seminar on the topic of the “creative class” (as popularised by Richard Florida) and its applicability to Northern Ireland. The agenda was to: Explain Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative class” and the link between economic [...] read our review »
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“Unionism Decayed 1997-2007″ by David Vance: book review
Tweet I initially wrote this when the book was first published three years ago; whilst certain elements of it now sound dated, its basic premise that the period of 1997-2007 was a period of irreversible decay for Northern Irish Unionism can still be argued as a valid opinion. My own feeling is that it did [...] read our review »
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