During a longer, more wide-ranging, conversation between UUP’s Reg Empey, Alliance Party’s David Ford, and BBC NI’s Noel Thompson and Mark Devenport during the EU election count on Monday, Reg Empey opened the door on the dysfunctional Northern Ireland Executive – mentioned previously – and shed some light on the semi-detached polit-bureau in action. Full conversation – part 1 and part 2.
The words of Brian O’Nolan, variously Brian Ó Nualláin, Myles na gCopaleen, Myles na Gopaleen and, of course, Flann O’Brien. That O’Nolan was referencing his own dissolute student days at UCD only mildly distracts from the prophetic undertone of his words: I paid no attention whatsoever to books or study and regarded lectures as a [...] read our review »
Writer Christopher Hitchens has died aged 62. He was as contrary as he was brilliant. Here is a brief In Memoriam from Vanity Fair (his outlet of choice since 1992) and, here, a longer tribute from his friend Christopher Buckley Stanley in The New Yorker. Better, perhaps, though to post one of Hitchens’ own writings in [...] read our review »
It took me a long time to warm to advertising agencies. The first time I worked with one I was working in sales management on Fairy Washing Up Liquid. I was due to attend a meeting at which I was to be told what consumers really thought of the brand. I remember my reluctance to [...] read our review »
Pete, when are you going to produce a commentary on the dysfunctional committees? The Executive limitations have alreadly been covered.
But Reg, *they are* running the Executive exactly as it was designed. Let’s not have any guff about how it was ‘intended’ to be run – you’ll find rather more than one opinion, now and at the time of its creation, about that – but let’s do the empirical British thing and look at *how* it can be run. And it can be run today exactly the way the original legislation allows it to be. Some us Reg – some of us in the UUP at the time of its creation (and in my case, still in the sodding party) told you, and the Turtle, that it was a grievously flawed system for precisely the reasons you’re now feebly whining about. And what did you say at the time, when it was being run to your and the Turtle’s advantage? You told us we were talking out of our hats, and that it wasn’t possible to get a better system anyway. Isn’t it astonishing what slumping to under 20% in the polls, and flatling there ever since can do for ones grasp of constitutional law?
[My sumbit word is 'could', and if ever there were a more bitterly ironic word about the performance of the UUP in the last 15 odd years, I never want to hear it].