This Ballysillan row continues. According to the BBC the City Council insists that the booking was made in the name of a resident’s group. Sinn Fein’s Margaret McClenaghan is adamant that “No matter how you try to dress it up, it was in support of a unionist paramilitary group, namely north Belfast UDA”. Hmmm…
Fair play to Iain, he managed to get over 2,200 people voting in his poll for the top Northern Irish blogs this year… We (just, I imagine) retained our top spot, with Splintered coming straight in at number 2, no doubt his pet subject du jour will have garnered him a lot of fans… I’ve [...] read our review »
The nod and wink politics of Ireland’s last two or three decades as practised par excellence by Bertie, Albert and Charlie is ultimately what has the Republic in the stew it’s in. Don’t get me wrong, the effective monitoring of those exercising of power does not demand full disclosure of everything all the time. But [...] read our review »
‘news’ is often a polite way of saying ‘editor’s whim’ Given the shift from print to online and e-ink, maybe Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists was a suitable first first book for me to finish reading on the Kindle. Considering the economic pressures on the newspaper industry, his novel perhaps captures the spirit and soul of [...] read our review »
“No matter how you try to dress it up..”
A residents’ group, indeed…
It always amazes me how Belfast City Councillors distance themselves from the decisions of their own Council. (“It wasn’t me; big boys did it”)
Week in, week out – you have some councillor quoted in the local papers deploring the actions of the Council. Are they not supposed to be running this institution? What’s going on here?
Are they suggesting that the civil servants are running the show without their say so?
Oh for gods sake, of course they aren’t running it. That’d be too much to ask…
We all know that many ‘residents groups’ have fairly interesting memberships, perhaps this one is no exception.